I said once, the first time Trump was president,
we, the American people or audience were in a BDSM relationship.
I should probably say the audience as we were subjected to Trump TV
all day every day.
And the events and scenarios were so catastrophic
and unfathomable,
every day raised our pain threshold,
things we’d tolerate:
Melania wearing an I really don’t care jacket to visit migrant children
imprisoned at the border,
Trump calling women world leaders nasty,
overheard saying women should be grabbed by their pussies,
saying Covid-19 would vanish like an Easter miracle
when hundreds of thousands were dying,
suggesting one should ingest bleach,
as he and his children dying their hair blonde
and espoused Aryan propaganda.
I haven’t even mentioned Jan 6th but the constant shock
made us numb.
We became desensitized to violence, subjected to it every day.
My parents, sad to say, also had this type of relationship.
The constant fighting and physical violence reduced any sensation
of how odd and unnatural it was;
it became normal.
Like growing up in a family environment,
violence and self-hatred, abandonment, cruelty was
normal.
I never knew, until much later, there were other ways to be.
Once I witnessed an argument between my parents so volatile
it was like flames on a keg of gun powder
when they finished, my mother got dressed put on lipstick
as if nothing had happened.
Another time they were arguing and I saw my father slapping himself
in the face as some sort of self-punishment and
it was completely out of control.
Since his death, my mother has transferred that level of argument
and fighting to me.
It is unbearable, the screaming and accusations and such.
My threshold is not as high as hers.
I explained to a friend what’s gone on in my family,
what my mother has said and done,
cutting me out of the will and giving money to her family and so on.
As I explaimed this to relatively normal person from a different city,
and a man, an artist, He kept saying, “oh my god that’s horrible, horrible!”
The other guy at the table got up and walked away.
I asked if I’d said too much, he says no,
It’s just terrible and I feel so bad, he said.
It’s only by their reaction I can gage
the amount of poison I’ve swallowed.
It is by no means ordinary.
It’s like a ledger of horror described in tabloids
that rely on shock.
