Are You A Victim?

This was originally going to be a “spur-of-the-moment” thing, but I should had know better than to assume such things. Work decided to pick up these past few weeks, and I place making money as a greater priority. But I still took the time to write this because I believe this is in some measure a teachable lesson. Now for my question…

Are you a victim?

Do you feel as if you’ve been subjugated by your circumstances and other people. Do you believe to be born the wrong race, sex, religion, or just happen screw the wrong thing? Life sucks for everyone at some level. We all have problems. We all struggle with something. But That’s life. Get over it!

Defining Victims and Victimhood

“Victims” or people who have embraced victimhood (the victim mentality) are ruled by their problems both real and imagined. They believe that their problems are the result of someone else’s actions, not their own. (I.E. – big corporations, republicans, rich people, CIA, etc.) Victims gravitate towards events, illogic, unnecessary fears, and conspiracy theories that support their grievances. No, the facts don’t really need to matter, just whatever can be used to continue the grief.

On a personal level, victimhood stifles creativity. It destroys self-esteem. It makes us lazy and gives us excuses why we can’t do what we want. It creates dependency. Victimhood perpetuates new victims and makes scapegoats of others, many who we don’t even know. It drives our focus away from the things we want to the things we dislike.

Victims end up becoming destructive whenever they and their enablers seek to use their grievances to attack, bully, and impose their will upon others around them. They’ll protest, file lawsuits, and lobby to pass bad legislation and regulations. All of which end up violating someone else’s rights and expanding government’s reach into everyone’s lives. Whenever such nonsense gets opposed in public, victims will cry foul and accuse the opposition of being ignorant, bigoted, phobic, and/or just plain hateful. Sadly this is pretty effective because it’s easier to manipulate people with emotions and phony accusations than to create a logical argument for what you want to impose. Whenever victims and their associated groups get their way, it’s never enough. There’s no final accomplishment that will ever put an end to whatever’s supposedly antagonizing them. There’s always another crisis being discovered and more regulation, restrictions, and laws that need to be imposed in order to rectify it.

Having a victim mentality causes us to think and behave irrationally. A great example is a TV campaign ad I had recently seen. The announcer, in a serious voice, accuses a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate of wanting to “cut” Social Security. Then a horrified elderly couple appears, and talks about how awful it would be if Republican candidate X ever got elected because all on him own, he’d cut their benefits. Now mind you, there has never been a Republican candidate with any fortitude, that has ever campaigned on “cutting Social Security”. Never mind the fact that when Congress “cuts” something, they don’t literally cut the budget of any given program. They cut the rate of increase. In other words, the guaranteed increase that U.S. government programs receive every fiscal year is just reduced for that year. (This is referred to as baseline budgeting.) Despite all this, there are enough senior citizens out there who believe in the myth of the Social Security “lockbox”, and that those icky, evil, rich Republicans want to make them destitute by either cutting or completely doing away with the Social Security program. In spite of the fact that the latest crop of elderly, baby-boomers, possess possibly the largest amount of wealth of any generation and will therefore be less likely to have to spend their twilight years out on the street. Yet this scare-tactic still works every election cycle.

In Old News…

This has long been forgotten due the invasion of global warming fanatics at the United Nations and President Obama’s affirmation that he’ll continue to piss away more money that my country doesn’t have and further regulate the U.S. economy into the ground in the name of fighting “climate change”. Then there’s the Ebola epidemic, which the Obama administration has continued to bungle.

Before all of that insanity, actress Emma Watson was ushered in to speak in front of the United Nations. This is the same organization that has given seats on their Human Right’s Council to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria. All of whom are active violators of human rights.

None the less, Miss Watson stood before the U.N. giving the usual laundry list of feminist talking points, along with all of the horrific personal experiences of surviving life as a child star. Poor kid. Despite all of the real problems that exist in the world (child prostitution, ISIS, free speech under threat, unborn girls being murdered via abortion, a potential global currency crisis), Emma was still upset by the fact that average everyday people just didn’t think like her and the rest of her elitist friends. That in a nutshell was the point of her speech. You yokels just weren’t thinking right.

What made this speech even more laughable was the fact that this was used to help launch the now long-forgotten #HeForShe campaign. For the 99% of you that’s never heard of it, it’s basically another “awareness” campaign to encourage the targets of the modern feminist movement, males, to carry their water and the message of “gender equality”. This has been apart of feminists’ recent efforts to improve their image of being ugly, man-hating, and obnoxious.

Absurd as this was, there were gobs of people on Twitter that night hash-tagging “HeForShe”, and tweeting as if what Watson read was something biblical. Even one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman made a huge fuss over it, for the sake of humanity. Which in all honesty was pretty sad. Now let’s jump to the fun part of the story…

[adsenseyu5]

Now Poke It with A Stick!

Every now and then I’ll have the tendency of stirring up the pot. So I tweeted to Gaiman that I won’t ever take such a flaky campaign seriously until “feminists” do something serious. Because let’s face it, unlike women in the Muslim world, women here in the West have it pretty good now a days. Women have not only advanced in many areas of society, they’ve superseded men. Go shopping, and look for the store and department managers, most of them will be women. Hell, I’ll even see whole stores operated by women. With all of the attention given to young girls in schools, women are dominating most colleges and universities. During any custody battle, the mother usually has the edge and sympathy over the father. I’ve known many dads who have been hammered financially by the court system over child-support payments. These aren’t guys that were trying to run out on their kids either. Despite all of these advances, it’s easier to recycle the same tired issues and fears.

So instead of feminists moving on to actual problems occurring to women and girls in our world, a big one should be the treatment of women in Muslim societies/cultures and the lack of freedoms they experience (you know something that might stick out like a sore thumb). Instead modern feminists are currently focusing on feminizing men and eradicating the concept of gender. This has led to all sorts of f*cked-up social experiments that we’ll all later regret.

Case in point are the children at a Lincoln, Nebraska school district being indoctrinated into no longer referring to themselves as “boys” or “girls”. They’re just “persons”, “scholars”, or whatever at the time doesn’t offend all of the li’l cross-dressers and hermaphrodites due to their “gender space” issues. This may seem harmless to most of you at first, but in the long-term this will bring about all sorts of social chaos. A kid’s grade-school years are the time when they are taught the values, boundaries, and beliefs that they will carry on into adulthood. If the things kids are taught are convoluted garbage, guess how they’ll live their lives in adulthood? It’s too damn bad public schools couldn’t bring any focus on something like, may be math, reading, or science.

I poked Gaiman with the plight of Muslim women because these are women who could actually use the help of western feminists. They have no freedoms, no liberties, or rights. In sharia-based societies a woman can not go out in public without her husband or a man who is related to her. They’re not allowed to do simple things we all take for granted like driving. A woman’s testimony means nothing unless there’s another woman or two to back her up. Whatever freedoms Muslim women do obtain, they have had to fight for themselves to obtain. They’re more likely to be made-up like clowns and forced to learn pig-latin before western feminists ever make any serious effort to help their muslim sisters.

A young woman, Reyhaneh Jabbari was just hanged for murder in Iran. The scumbag she killed in self-defense reportedly tried to rape her. She was held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer and family for two months. After a shame investigation and trial, she was executed.

Now let me tell you a dirty secret. Modern feminism, just like every other progressive victim group has less to do with helping women and more to do with obtaining power. Their groups constantly draw attention via awareness campaigns, raise money with those campaigns, and use that money to lobby bureaucrats and fund candidates sympathetic to them.

On the flip-side, modern feminist will seek to harm  women and girls for their own selfish ends. They will attack and destroy conservative women, who have demonstrated that they can do it on their own, like Sarah Palin and her family. They’ll flush away the innocence of (and screw-up for life) 6 year-old little girls by having them curse like a sailor on the internet while regurgitating propaganda. Now these little girls will have to live with this for the rest of their lives because whenever you post something online, it’s there virtually forever. There is no low that victim groups like modern feminists won’t sink to because in their minds, anything is justified for their cause.

[adsenseyu4]

Go Twitter Yourself

The best response I received on Twitter was to “read” Watson’s speech. To be fair, I’ve read it about three times over (and read it over again for this post). I’ve yet to have seen new words appear to address my concerns or cynicism.

Then right on time, I had some dork trying to get snippy with me. I had horribly offended his sensibilities and by golly, he was gonna put me down. If this had been about 15 or 20 years ago, there would had been a flame-war (A dated reference that goes back to when your grandpa shot someone else insults via text-based email while using crank-style dial-up modems that were so slow, it took a good 30 minutes to load RocketMail into Netscape Navigator.) that would had lasted a good two months or more. In about two to three random-sounding tweets, all I could do was laugh at the goof and call it a night. What would be the point of continuing with another dead-end?

The Moral of This Story…

If you are a free human being, you can not only choose your circumstances, but if your circumstances currently suck, you also have the choice as to how you react to them. Even in the worst of circumstances, you still have the freedom to choose how to respond and ultimately act. In Viktor Frankl’s book, “[amazon text=Man’s Search For Meaning&chan=amazon default&asin=0807060100]”, Frankl documents the horrors and torments he experienced as an inmate in the Nazi concentration camps. He had everything taken away from him. Despite his situation, Frankl continued to hold to the idea that his life still had purpose. He held on to the hope that one day, he will survive the concentration camps and finally re-write and publish his life’s work. (He started all over using scraps of paper.) Now he could had given up like so many of his fellow inmates and accepted his fate. But instead Frankl rose above his circumstances and survived to live a successful career as a psychologist.

Also don’t lower yourself to the level of sheep. If you want to live the life you want to live, don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by others. Don’t think, believe, talk, or act because everyone else is doing the same. This is referred to group-think or herd-mentality.

Don’t stress over pleasing everyone. You’ll never make everyone happy. People falling into this trap have slipped into addictions, joined gangs, terrorist groups, or political movements that have murdered millions, and screw up the lives of those under their subjugation.

Don’t make your choices based on fear and negativity. Don’t ever make the false assumption that you’re “just stuck”. Because that’s bull-cr@p. You will always have a choice. You will either benefit or suffer from it. Not making a choice is a choice. So choose wisely.