Fellow Americans spiraling downward clinging to the irrational
It is not unusual for many of us find it hard to understand Trump supporters. We don't understand their motivations, their behaviors, their beliefs, or what drives some of them to actually mount an insurrection. I think we often just assume that they are all a bunch of racists and white supremacist sympathizers with poor educations and a perverse interpretation of Christianity. Many of us have close relatives, friends, and neighbors that seem to have changed overnight into something we simply can't recognize anymore. I think that the real situation is just more complicated than we might assume. I gained a little insight into one of these people recently and I think it would help if we all understood a little bit more about the individuals that find themselves in these dark places.
My wife has a massage therapist that she hasn't seen in quite a while because of the pandemic. Since we are both fully vaccinated and she had some gift certificates to use up, she made an appoint to see her old therapist recently. It was to say the least, a very bizarre experience and certainly the last time she will ever go near this therapist.
She had completely changed over the course of the year to someone unrecognizable from her previous self. Mind you, this woman was a gifted massage therapist. She wasn't highly educated but had a gift for her profession that could not be taught in any school. She had always been kind of "New-Age-ish" but in a positive kind of way that made you chuckle but you put up with it because she was so damn gifted at her craft. An example of this was that she could simply look at an elbow and say, "You've had damage to this joint", when it was something that had happened decades before. She also had a very positive energy that infected everyone around her.
During my wife's visit, this therapist made it clear that she was not vaccinated for COVID and that she was trying to save others from the evils of vaccination. She had read some stuff on the internet that vaccinated people shed spike proteins and could affect non-vaccinated people and that she herself could feel the negative effects of being too close to vaccinated people. She talked about every conspiracy theory out there endlessly throughout the session and admitted that she had gone down some pretty dark rabbit holes over the past year. She was so negative and consumed by thoughts of evil corporations and the dangers of people like my wife that had been vaccinated that her business was failing through neglect and paranoia. What difference a year had made.
All she kept saying was that she wanted to help people because she felt so sorry for them because they were some uninformed. She never questioned her own beliefs for a moment. It was all about how others needed to realize how misguided they were. Going down a few dark rabbit holes had taught her nothing. She was convinced that she was saving the world through her efforts to inform them of their misguided beliefs. She had become an impenetrable brick wall.
She also had related an incident that someone had recorded and she admitted that she had gone off the deep end in that moment. I think it was a mental breakdown that she was describing. She was damaged and receding into herself. It is hard to watch someone with such a natural gift for healing wither and become a shell of her former self all because of these contemptible purveyors of hate and division. She was a genuinely good person that was bouncing through life healing others with her gifts and now she is fast receding into a dark corner of the Right-wing conspiracy echo chamber and pushing any sense of reality to the furthest reaches of her mind.
This is what these people are costing all of us. So sad.
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