All the literature advises to not respond to bullying. To cut your losses and limp away from the cruelty. Limp away from the horror that someone wanted to hurt and humiliate you.

The bully’s or bullies’ goal was to gratify himself or herself or themselves to assert enough power to find a way to dominate you, to torturously whammy your sense of psychological grounding and well being, at least for a short period (but all the better if it has more obvious profound impact -- like to get you to leave a community that you a short time ago really cherished and felt safe in). Maybe they have some grounds or think they do to call you out. Calling out is one thing. “Demonizing” or “character assassination” or "schadenfreude" is another. We all know the difference.

Their main goal is to profoundly weaken your stature within your mutual community, if possible. That’s what schadenfreude and malice are about. Lazily and narcissistically clearing the field by taking down others so the “takers” feel more on top. Perverse Darwinism on steroids.

I don’t think even the bully or bullies know how much psychic residue the malice leaves with his or her or their victims.

I wondered about the victims of Bush’s torture program, now Obama’s but denied and/or minimized by that administration, of course. Strangers being tortured by US strangers or other ethnic strangers we had outsourced the “job” to. Thrown into rat holes, put into insanely cruel stress positions, enduring simulated drownings, made to strip naked and even worse unimaginable sexual torture. Wondering WHY? WHY ME?

Why were they in such a hell suddenly? The victim enduring the physical torture on one level but on another the psychologically torturous confusion of what had they done to deserve such vicious (and anti-Geneva Conventions) cruelty being delivered against them by anonymous but cruel acting strangers?  GRATUITOUSLY! Since they are of other nationalities than US or western Europe, that bottom line means they can easily be kidnapped and tortured and if they survive it (many didn’t) locked up for years or in the case of those at Gitmo for life, even when they (some -- many) have been proven innocent? So many cases of mistaken identity (rampant since poor people were paid-off for pointing the finger at fellow countrymen and there was the language barrier which added to the confusion and the misidentifying) and that still didn't matter. The insane abuse continued and continues on. WTF?

I think of Obama’s weekly Tuesday “Kill List” of “terrorists” to be assassinated for that week by drones. I wonder if they enjoy coffee and muffins as they ponder.

It seems one or two or perhaps a lot more at open salon have their own periodic “kill list” for character assassination. Maybe not weekly. Not yet.

Once again, the amorality on the national plane reflects amorality on the local plane. And vice versa.

With perpetual war all over the planet, why the hell shouldn’t bullying be escalating at the local levels? I read on one blog adult cyber-bullying is escalating profoundly and is being perpetrated more and more by adult women even more than men. What is that about?

Titillation and schadenfreude. You see it on the television in reality shows. Even in news reporting. Another civil war “dust-up” in Syria (as a US-enabled Al Qaeda jihadist terrorist beheads another innocent person or simply slits his or her throat), as we sit and from the safety and comfort of our own non-war torn country ignore the fact that our tax dollars and our government is doing all it can to devastate a country for dishonorable reasons. Working with Al Qaeda, no less. (Hey, let's be pragmatic -- ends justifies the means, after all!) Life is cheap. Thousands and thousands of Syrians will die violently or have to find another homeland, but what the hey, the US and Israel and “cronies” will have demolished an ally of Iran and that is the amoral chess game our war addicts at the head of state want. To hell with the golden rule. To hell with humanity. To hell with giving peace a chance. Peace? Get over yourself, you sissy!

Hey, nobody slit my throat or beheaded me so what am I crabbing about, huh? Point taken.

And look at Manning and Assange, what they have had to deal with being at the hands of bullies with much greater means to devastate their lives and use them as an example of what happens when someone bucks a system dominated and terrorized by cronyistic amoral people who know how to effectively organize and punish. Why amoral crony nations, US, Britain, Sweden, are willing to collude in “getting” Assange for daring to challenge the economic and military gangsters in power. And the whole world must learn that you can’t hide in any corner of the world, the POWER of the bottom feeding scum sucking elite political/corporate/military mafia internationally will track you down and kill or torture you! Why, they’ve got DRONES, after all. Might makes right!!!! Keep your head down or even if you do, you MAY BE NEXT!

To me the horror on the open salon local plane was not only dealing with one or two obvious bullies, but dealing with a formidable posse of secondary bullies whom I did not expect to have such ready, willing and able spirits to join up in the hurting and the humiliating. It made me think of the horrifying phenomenon of a “gang” rape. How the group of eager to please cohorts of a really sick individual shelves its capacity for conscience and acts out the most vicious acts of misogyny on a fellow human being, usually a woman but not necessarily. I would categorize a gang-up pile-on for character assassination as more akin to gang rape than trivialize it as a mere “dust-up”. My take.

Also, there is the horror of the vast balance of the community that apparently deals with and has dealt with moments of downright sick amoral group behavior of such a significant number of fellow citizens to simply batten down the hatches during the explosion of malice and schadenfreude and wait it out. Ignore or even enable with good-will cronyism on the return of the “conquering anti-heroes.” To exhale a collective sigh later and trivialize and minimize the ugly “phenomenon”, that disturbing opening of the communal “heart of darkness” portal, and re-embrace the perpetrators and laughingly or a bit uncomfortably dismiss it all as one more “dust-up”. Rate them, give them nurturing comments. Show them that loyalty is there for them -- unconditional loyalty. Wow.

To me as apparently one more victim of this periodic open salon game, it had to do with something a lot bigger, heavier and more vile than “dust”.

Oh, those darn kids. At it again with their little character assassination and vicious humiliation games. And when the person clearly can’t take the joke, escalate, escalate, escalate. Uppity bitch. Uppity anti-Obama bitch (in my particular case). And after all, soon after, the cannibals morph back to human form, charming and witty and self-congratulatory and self-deprecating even about it all (their little lapses of cruelty, oops, “my bad”) with such peer-pressuring rationalizations and after all, they’ve got the numbers. So many, many, many willing to play at least at the edges of it all. Look at those comments and those ratings!

What are you going to do? Call them out? I’m talking about you, the non-participants. Believe me, I know the price.

Who would want to step in front of the next oncoming train? Get real!

Thank God they have returned to being their charming selves once again. They only try to take out one or two or three people at a time. And if that satisfies them for a while.... Well, we should consider ourselves lucky.

One more uppity woman or even uppity guy got his. Nobody’s perfect so they are fair game. And if some seem near perfect (and by no means do I put myself in that category) all the more reason to have at them. Sometimes life is tough. They got a lesson in toughening up. So it goes. Life ain’t no rose garden.

If their (their victims/survivors') participation changes with the community, so it goes. They may open up less. They may pull back. They may become even more defensive. Nothing like a good humbling, after all. Character building?

If they (their victims/survivors) leave the community with a huge sense of sadness and/or bitterness, so it goes. Their fault for not being able to handle it. No serious skin off our noses. After all, there is such a thing as free speech. Bullies have rights, right?

There is an old movie called “A Gentleman’s Agreement” I saw years and years ago with Gregory Peck. I can’t remember it that well. I think it was a movie that was maybe too didactic, telling more than showing, as they say, but the theme of it was noble. It was about anti-Semitism. At one point, one of the victims of anti-Semitism calls out not the racists but the silent enablers of racism. He asks Peck and his girlfriend how many times they were with some respectable peers at a party and someone said something really shocking and ugly suddenly, made a tasteless and racist joke. The joke was so ugly that it made Peck and his girl friend probably look away, their faces frozen for at least a second or two over the ugliness of the comment, maybe they felt a sicky feeling in the pits of their stomachs.

But did they call out the racism the questioner wondered? Really call it out? Or did they endure it and thus enable it? They admitted they didn’t call it out directly. They promised him they would from then on.

Thought I would share some thoughts and feelings post my experience of this past week.

I know I had some karma coming to me on this site. I have been pre-emptively defensive at times and am sorry for that. And I can be flat-footed in my reformer zeal about politics and with generalization. And God knows, I talk the talk a lot farther than I walk the walk.

But the “dust-up” I witnessed from the inside was profound. I empathize with those who have had it even worse and for a longer duration than myself.

I grew up in a troubled household. My dad drank and could suddenly morph into a bully and then when he came back to being nice again we all exhaled with relief and tried to enjoy his spirit knowing the roller coaster would inevitably visit the dark and threatening venting malice place again.

My mother suffered from borderline disorder and the roller coaster would take us to her paralyzing and horrifying darkness at times. Fewer times than Dad’s, but I would take a thousand of Dad’s diatribes to avoid her annihilating malice when it ambushed.

I minimized and denied like crazy. I think as a kid you have to to function. I denied and minimized so much so that I blamed myself for deserving much of the malice -- assumed shame and responsibility -- for those ambushes. Shame more than guilt. With guilt you have a sense of what you did. With shame you feel all the more lost since you can’t understand the logic of the vilification. You are confused. I was so confused so often growing up. They say confused means “con” -- with -- and “fused” -- bound to. I don’t want to be confused by and bound to gratuitous cruelty any more. I have enough to take care of in terms of legitimate character weaknesses I need to address, without gratuitous bullying shaming and confusing me.

I can’t minimize and deny as much any more. I don’t want to go back there. It erodes too much of my own spirit.

Cruel is cool?

Not in my book.