We are so back.

Blame the victims

In the GOP's top ten things to do first

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anais Nin

I am slightly hopeful that some of the denial and anger we are seeing today is because of grief - which means the fracture has already happened - even if they don’t know it yet.

For most, when we wake up from our beautiful delusions, we face a deep grief at the loss of the world as we knew it - we experience all the stages of grief, especially denial and anger. We shoot a lot of messengers in the process of grieving our loss.

By default, we believe we are merely looking through the window and objectively describing the thing we see, but what we are actually describing is mostly our own reflection in the widow glass staring back at us.

The quote wedged itself into a tiny crack in my wall of certainty. As I came to realize that *truth* and *my perception of it* were different things, Anaïs gave me a mantra to guide my exploration.

I wasn’t gentle with my response.

The other sort of nostalgia is a voice in the wilderness counseling us to flee our current struggles and retreat back to the complacency & bondage of the past.

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Nostalgia is powerful when our honestly-considered collective past experience gives us the courage to explore the future with openness and hope.

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Alas, this brief relief only effected the symptoms of their pain, providing fading relief that slowed their further exploration and addressing of the actual root causes of their discomfort.

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It was magical and before the buzz faded they felt relieved of the weight of their current anxiety caused by the quickly changing world around them and the pressure it was putting on them to engage and adapt.

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One constant theme was always that congregations tend to grieve more about losing their Pastor - than they do for the abuse suffered by the victims.

This is a post about the Epstein Files.

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