A few days back I noted here that there is a federal law against knowingly endangering people’s lives with disease, transmission or infection with viruses, bacteria, unsafe medicines, nefarious administration of substances, harsh practices or lack of gold standard information for protections’ sake, neglect and abandonment of the vulnerable, that puts any person’s or persons’ lives at risk and worse: It is against the law to do so.
I cited in the past here, cases of purposeful withholding of information from the patient[s], as a criminal act: such as the Tuskegee ‘experiment’ in giving only half of those suffering with disease of syphilis, penicillin, the other half placebos, without their knowledge. So that some lived in false hope, and some died.
I spoke of those who knew they were HIV positive and purposely spread the disease without using condoms as a hygienic prophylactic. Those who knew they were infected, and refused to tell others, and thus spread other diseases to dozens, hundreds and thousands, killing many.
Like the poor working class woman nicknamed Typhoid Mary who was told and told she was an carrier and had to stop cooking for others. She refused. Even though she could have done other jobs. She infected dozens who died as Typhoid is a fecal to human disease. All crimes.
I’m just going to call Donald’s repetitive fouls now; imo, old Donald is a murderer. Donald the Murderer.
Donald the one carries unflinching disregard for the lives of others. Donald the Murderer who has careless, reckless disregard for others lives. Donald who has and continues to withhold available life-saving and life sparing information and resources from endangered and ill persons, their families and caregivers so as to bring them perilously close to death, letting hundreds of thousands languish and die when he could have helped greatly.
How many has he killed by his purposeful and knowing neglect of souls in prisons, old folks’ homes, military, at sea, colleges, churches, immigration ‘centers’, tenements, places of the poor, places of persons of all classes, all races, all economic means?
I’d say in keeping with his kin, Pol Pot, Papa Doc, Stain pre wwII, Hitler, Tito, and others, he has gotten a head start with a quarter million deaths many of which likely he could have, with adequate money and resources, aided back to reasonable health, including those who appear to have been left uncounted by the unscrupulous who are his henchmen and hench-women in health and human services.
He has decimated Native Americans by promising and not giving in a timely way, funds that he promised… Native people whom he professes to loathe for they were able to build successful casinos while his in Atlantic City failed utterly as Donald the Murderer kills most everything he touches.
[In his bogus court case against east coast tribal groups, he claimed they were not even Native American, because to him, ‘They don’t look like Native Americans.” Right, Donald the Murderer posing again as Observer Know-Nothing.
His coyness and clutching at his pearls about his own CV19 testing today, of the depth of virus he is carrying, his having held close packed groups without masking, his gatherings having contributed if not initiated the killing of Herman Cain who was a ‘Trump the Murderer’ ally, has infected scores on people in the White House and those visiting the White House.
And in his seeming drug induced mania, Donald the Grinning Grim Reaper, has also endangered secret service people when Donald the Murderer insisted on riding like the Queen in her carriage outside the hospital to demonstrate what? To show off? Again? While putting others at risk?
I’d just suggest this, regarding why some people today, Saturday, will go meet in the deadly rose garden [incidentally BlueBeard in the old tale was slaughtered in a rose garden] while Donald the Murderous stands like Benito Mussolini on the balcony addressing them… one might wonder what gets into people that they are willing to risk their lives to show solidarity with their depraved and infected and ‘beloved’ leader.
The answers lie I think in the psychology of cults. It is likely this, a deep ‘longing for belonging,’ a taking of sides with whom they see not as savior, but as pitiful underdog now, a desire to be seen to be like deadly leader who falsely positions himself as oh so brave and bold and … invincible
But cult followers are not invincible.
They die as easily as a child.
As anyone strong or weakened w
ho contracts a deadly disease.
They are not bold
they are not brave
they are incautious
they are mind garbled
they are unthinking
they are broken in logic
Followers of many kinds of cult groups put making a public statement with cameras present– against their own health, mental and physical, against the health of their loved ones.
That is a fact: their longing to belong and be glanced at by ‘His Murdering’ above the health of their loved ones
What kind of love of kith and kin is that? when one does not put one’s little ones first, one’s vulnerable elders first, let alone oneself.
In cults, followers endanger themselves because the creep leader says to, most often saying
the world is hypocritical and corrupt
and only the followers and the leader is pure.
This is not true, the leader is often mentally ill while being functional enough to dress themselves, eat and talk somewhat understandably, at least for a time, until they enter their own delusions of grandeur, touting themselves as super heroes, invulnerable.
The desire to be like an action figure [Superman, BatMan, Black Panther, etc] is strong in the mad leader. Madness walking. [Think of Donald the Murderer pretending to be strong enough to throw down a giant wrestler at his staged fake performance ringside.
Donald the Murder definitely could not hold his own in a fist fight, but only endangering others by his reckless disregard for human life when he could have, should have given aid. He could have been a true heroic figure. But he chose himself as Number One first and foremost and always instead with a lust to be admired that rivals the old stories of the preening, gluttonous, greed be-sottted Vampire. ]
Jim Jones is an example of deteriorative cult leadership. Also between 780 and 1000 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in a mass suicide in Uganda. The group had splintered from Roman Catholicism to emphasize apocolypticism.
From 1994 to 1997, the Order of the Solar Temple‘s members began a series of mass suicides, which led to roughly 74 deaths; some members had personally donated over $1 million to the cult’s leader, Joseph Di Mambro. Their idea of death was that they were pure and others were not.
Ben Klassen formed the white supremacist group called the Creativity Movement. He wrote a book called The White Man’s Bible which called suicide “an honorable and dignified way to die for any … of a number of reasons, such as having come to the decision that life is no longer worthwhile.”
After the death of his wife he practiced what he preached and committed suicide. The trope again was this: in my blighted world view, those others are hopelessly evil and we alone are pure, we alone are invincible.
The deaths that came from the leaders sick sick words and world view, were legion. All the followers, ‘deep longing to belong’. All wanting a father [or mother], all wanting to be special, all wanting to push their divided world view on all others, and failing to convince.
There’s an old story I would leave you with…
The Day The Animals and Human Beings
Were Told In Order to Survive
They Had To Kill Their Own Kin…
The animals were in a famine, many were sick, many had died and no one stepped up to help nor to save them.
As the creatures lay dying and dead in field and forest, in the waters, on the mountains and in the desert, one of the animals, a big tortoise, rose up even though he was a little sick too, and he shouted that he was the strongest one, and the only way out was for all the animals to kill their mothers and fathers and their children– and eat them. Whats he really meant was HE wanted to eat their kin himself.
The animals were horrified. But who else overheard this Tortoise’s call to slaughter of kin, were the humans, who were also in famine. And some of the humans taking the Tortoise as their leader, began to try all the things the Tortoise said would help, but the remedies did not help for they were Tortoise remedies not discrete human remedies tailored to each person.
Thus, too many of the people fell into a deep sadness, for their own without proper helps, began to sicken and die. And die they did, more and more –depopulating the best amongst themselves as a species.
And the animals who were strongest yet, hurriedly took their old and young and their mates and friends and ran away to shelter best they could near clean water and under trees and under granite overhangs that were cool in the noonday sun.
And they cared for one another. And many more survived because of the care given each animal according to its own kind.
And in the end, after the great famine began to fade and they buried their dead, the strongest amongst the animals and the human beings sought out the Tortoise who had steered them heartlessly wrong.
When they found him hiding amidst a pile of bones of their dead kin whom he had let die and then he had eaten them, they dragged him out and they dropped him off a mountain ledge from which he tumbled over and over against the jagged rocks to the ground– still alive, but his shell was broken in pieces.
And the animals and the human beings say to this very day, this is why the Tortoise who led in an evil way, has many segments of his shell on his back all glued together, and that all his kin inherit this to keep the lesson alive… showing where he was brought to justice for having misled the creatures and human beings of the Earth for his own gain. That this deceit ought never happen again.
And so it goes mis compadres y comadres. So it goes.
Let us pray for all the humans and animals who are ill, that they find and be given all they can possibly have at this moment, that they not listen to the greedy tortugas of our world, but only to the best minds amongst all their own species.
______________
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a mestiza Chicana activist in service to the voiceless; as a post-trauma recovery specialist and psychoanalyst of 50 years clinical practice; and as a journalist covering stories of human suffering and hope.
She is a bestselling author [144 weeks New York Times Bestseller list], poet, and as post trauma recovery specialist, served at Columbine High School and community for three years after the massacre. She continues to work with 9-11 survivor families on both coasts, and is known internationally as an expert on cults and other groups’ psychologies, and for her post-trauma recovery protocol used to deputize citizens quickly to help in the aftermath of disasters.
Her books are published in 42 foreign languages, and she is Managing Editor and Columnist writing on politics, business and culture at the political newsblog, The Moderate Voice. She occasionally writes for the Huffington Post, and an archive of her columns on culture and social justice can be found at National Catholic Reporter online, under her work called El Rio Debajo Del Rio, “The River Beneath the River.”
She was Governor Romer and Governor Owens appointed Chair of the Colorado State Grievance Board for thirteen years for the Department of Regulatory Agencies of Colorado, and is a 2006 inductee into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. She recently taught with Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu Tum and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She made her premiere in spoken word with Dr. Toni Morrison and Dr. Maya Angelou at Carnegie Hall in 2006. She is currently featured in Emma Watson’s online book club of 24.5 million members.
She is now writing post-trauma recovery protocol in Spanish, English and with translators’ assistance, in three Mayan languages for the thousands of beleaguered children kidnapped from their families at the southern border of the United States. She and her Arabic translator have just completed the Post Trauma Protocol in Arabic for the people suffering from the aftermath of the explosions in Beirut. ‘There are never enough helping hands and voices after disasters. Everyone’s voices, hands and resources count.’
CODA
The image is by Jordan Spalding ©2020 all rights reserved, by permission. This is an image of a Galapagos tortoise. Just in case anyone asks, I cherish and protect the actual tortugas. This folk tale is a very old one with many versions from many ethnic groups. This is the ‘Tino version that was told by my father in my ethnic family.