Summer 2020
It takes time to assimilate the feeling of betrayal. The shock of trust being annihilated requires a patient approach. When a person realizes he has been lied to, and not merely lied to, but deceived cunningly for the goal of taking what would not have otherwise been granted — freely — there is, initially, some denial as to the sickening awfulness of the treachery.
Denial is a healthy response in the early going. It gives you time to prepare for time, the time needed to heal the inner scar. It is not time that heals wounds as much as what is done with that time.
From on high, the betrayer holds a perch of power that you did not intend to give to her. From on high, the deceiver climbed over your back to reach a height he would not have otherwise attained.
To help anyone with your heart-felt sincerity, and then to be cast aside because you’ve served the purpose of the user: the cut is deep, and it is the unkindest cut of all. You can protect yourself from a frontal assault, especially by an enemy. Adrenalin prepares you for the attack. The body, in many ways, equips you for doing battle.
You cannot defend yourself from an attack from the rear, from the gut-wrenching sense of the Judas kiss, the double-cross that you were convinced, by the double-crosser, would not occur, because, well . . .
I’m not like him. You can believe in me. I won’t let you down.
or
We’re all in it together, aren’t we, for the greater good, and you can’t trust the Other Guy.
Looking back, you can see the tell-tale signs that you couldn’t tell were signs at all. The giveaways were not yet given away. What was given away was your willingness to trust a person who used your trust against you. It hurts, and it stings, and no amount of tears and vows to never again be taken in — will erase the feeling of being marooned on your own desert island of deception.
When the experience is personal, you can chalk it up to experience: once burned, twice shy, three times paranoid, four times frozen in fear. Sooner or later, the heart has to trust, and it does, because the heart is not meant to be a cemetery of sorrow.
When the experience is on a public basis, and the security of your nation is round-the-clock put at risk by people sworn to protect the homeland, the demoralisation can run deep. The perfidy of cowards knows no bounds, and the fight-of-flight mechanism gets switched on fast — at least for those of us with strong survival skills. In this instance, adrenalin comes after the fact, oddly enough, when there no longer is anywhere to run!
I received a letter once, from a blood relative, when I was in my early 20s, to try to lure me into trusting, once more, people who had betrayed me. This person sincerely believed every word that she said from on high:
I know how much I have contributed to your mental illness. But I am different now. I have changed . . .
The only thing that had truly changed was the tactic of beguilement. The pretense was basically the same:
You are below me; I am above you.
But you are strong, and I am weak, and you have something that I need, but do not deserve. Therefore, I can try to use my sense of moral superiority over you, to get what I feel is my due.
In actuality, I was so vastly morally superior to this person that it perhaps hurt me to confront that truth. To do so would have put an end to one of the last remaining and tenuous links to my childhood. The ties that bind a person because of traumatic bonding can form a prison of anguish from which freedom almost feels impossible. There is a bright new world outside of the dark domain of pain and grief, a world of soothing radiance and comforting reality. Sadly, many people refuse to step outside of that shroud of a past that never became true for them. Somehow, remaining with the false imaginings of yore are preferred to the true inspirations of tomorrow.
In many ways, we unknowingly accept the positions into which we are unwillingly placed, by a blackguard in sheep’s clothing, because that arrangement is the only one that this relationship can support. And that relationship is one that we depend upon, even more than the person supposedly taking part in it. The need to be needed has tripped up many a fine fellow and faithful gal. The architecture of betrayal requires that innately lop-sided power structure. Your enemy knows you in ways that a friend never will.
Treason in a nation has a similar construct, and it takes a similar route. The peons must be spoon-fed the pablum of politically-correct poppycock by the Elites — to ensure the Elites remain in place. There, from on high, they do whatever must be done to ensure their uncharitableness toward all, their malice toward some. And “the some” are the very people who might one day replace those Elites. From on high, the theft of decency daily takes place, and the most humble among the citizenry is to be remain humble, and silenced.
The longer a truth remains bottled up, the more explosive and powerful will be the popping of the cork of that ruthless truth. Speaking real treason has never been easier in countries where citizens once upon a time felt free to speak the truth. The United States of America has become the beacon of bravery for free speech, although Americans did not necessarily aspire to that lofty perch. We are, on the whole, common men and common women of extraordinary courage. To stifle our spirits is to invite rebellion. To try to shut us up is to ensure loudmouths.
We do not place ourselves above others in the world. We are not on high, looking down upon nations that once ruled the seas and conquered vast swaths of continents. We are on the level. We look a person straight in the eye and, typically, we are straight shooters. To offend a true American, you have to work hard at it.
Perhaps, from on high, those European elites only know how to work hard at distancing themselves from Americans, and from America. It’s a foolish stance for anyone to take, a fool-hardy place for any nation to be, a perhaps fatal error in the game of life for nations threatened from within their own borders.
From on high, those European elites can fall faster than those revered statues they put into boxes — to give those dead heroes a time-out. Those heroes are not on a time-out, and, in many ways, they are not dead. Their destinies are still alive in the nations they loved and sacrificed to save from the barbarians of previous eras. I’ve heard of forgetting the past; I’d not heard of putting it in a pine box.
The time is at hand for the new heroes in Europe. There are none among the elites. I look forward to a new generation, leading the way for the believers in history. I yearn for the believers in tomorrow. And I trust in the modern heroes who know the path to tomorrow, and who know that the path to nowhere has been trod, many times over, by fools and by buffoons, the glitterati who came to confusion when destiny cast them aside, and, at last, the heroes upon the scene of fortune arrived.