So well said and spot on! Again and again and again, we must expose the many faces of violence and stand as firmly and consistently as we can in peace, integrity, truth, justice, and an ongoing commitment to alleviating the suffering and harm in our world and not enabling, justifying, or adding to it. ― Molly
I have girded myself to take the punches that will likely come, but this must be said in the loudest, clearest words possible. CAGE FIGHTING IS NOT A SPORT AND MUST BE BANNED.
It is a disgusting and vile display of brutal cruelty that has no place in a civilized society. And the fact that the president of the United States is giving it his imprimatur and trying to make it more acceptable as part of his self-aggrandizing celebration of his birthday will never make this form of human cock fighting anything more than an example of how low we can become when motivated by greed and the most base of human instincts.
My position on this is not new. In the same way as I tried to stop the diving donkey act on the public owned Alabama State Fair grounds in the 1980's where docile, dumb animals were forced by electric cattle prods to jump into a pool of water from an elevated platform, I also tried to stop the use of Boutwell Auditorium as a modern colosseum where men would intentionally brutalize and bloody each other in inescapable confined spaces while a screaming crowd similar to those who watched the murder of gladiators and Christians as entertainment satisfied a sick lust for extreme violence.
In a time where unbridled violence is an everyday occurrence in public places like schools, shopping centers, and even churches, our focus must be on making all forms of violence and attacks on human dignity and decency unacceptable, not celebrated with the demeaning of the People' s House and most recognized symbol in the world of the greatest democracy on earth. Not a dime of public money should be spent to subsidize yet another vulgar and demeaning of our cultural decline which we are witnessing each.
Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue and exploitation into spectacle.
The hyped-news of Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is not a triumph of human progress and individual initiative but a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis. It is about the power of class privilege, and the corrupting forces that give life to gangster capitalism. Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not only on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources ― not to mention an ideology filled with the mobilizing passions of authoritarianism and white supremacy ― at least in the age of Trump.
Yet this development also exposes the power of a culture and public pedagogy that normalizes and celebrates massive and staggering inequities in wealth and power. In a society saturated by the myths of entrepreneurial genius and limitless success, extreme concentrations of wealth are legitimated as objects of admiration rather than outrage. The scandal is not simply that one person possesses more wealth than entire nations while millions struggle to survive; it is that people are taught to view this grotesque form of imbalance as natural, inevitable, and even desirable.
Under these conditions, inequality becomes a spectacle sustained by a lethal public pedagogy in which exploitation is rebranded as achievement, and democracy itself is endangered as economic power increasingly shapes politics, public discourse, and everyday life. Trillionaire politics is the end point of a politics inhabited by the walking dead. The first trillionaire is not a monument to individual greatness but an indictment of a corrupt social order that mistakes unchecked power and toxic masculinity for success and falsely educates citizens to applaud their own dispossession, misery, loneliness, and suffering.
My extended article on Musk will be published Friday in CounterPunch.
It takes courage, a lot of courage, to seek to truly understand and face where we are today and the multiple crises that humans and all species on Earth are tragically experiencing. And knowing the truth has never been more important. Without embodying a profound commitment to truth ― and integrity, consciousness, connection, and solidarity ― we remain vulnerable to being paralyzed in ignorance and illusions, apathy and inaction, disinformation and denial, depression and despair, propaganda and polarization, dehumanization and delusion, and all of the many faces of trauma and violence and ever growing inequality, injustice, and impoverishment of our hearts and souls.
This is why reading, listening to, watching, and absorbing the wisdom of truth-tellers like Chris Hedges is so essential.
We are all interrelated, all connected, all family, and all in this together. ― Molly
MEXICO CITY — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power.
The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.
When the teachers went on strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006, following the incarceration and disappearances of union leaders, police fired on the protesters. The community rose up and drove the police out of the city. Oaxaca established an autonomous anarchist commune for several months. Although the commune was ultimately crushed by the Mexican government, the uprising spawned popular assemblies, independent media and empowered indigenous communities.
The second way to destroy capitalism is through the nationalization of industries and banks and the seizure of capitalist assets, although this can give rise to an equally pernicious form of state capitalism. This radical route entails, as in the Russian or Cuban revolutions, violence. Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.
Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.
Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.
Luxemburg also knew that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. Imperialism, which empowers a war machine designed to enrich arms merchants and global capitalists, is accompanied by a poisonous ideology — what social critic Dwight Macdonald in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” calls the “psychosis of permanent war” — which makes socialism impossible.
The psychosis of permanent war results, as it has in the U.S., in the curtailing of civil liberties and punishing economic austerity. Dissent is equated with treason. State power serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy, which devolves into farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show.
The rollback of the New Deal, the closest we came to a social democracy, began in the mid-1940s. Cold War anti-communism and corporate opposition converged to make war on organized labor and the New Deal left. This assault culminated in the Second Red Scare.
In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 launched loyalty investigations that purged the left, including public-sector workers and union allies. That same year, the Taft–Hartley Act directly targeted organized labor by restricting strikes, secondary boycotts and union security agreements and by requiring union officers to sign anti-communist affidavits.
The left fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker, in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”
“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” Schrecker writes.
This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”
The witch hunts silenced communists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who denounced the abuses of empire and capitalism. The “anti-red” actions dealt devastating blows to the political health of the country. The radicals spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street and the billionaire class are the enemy. They offered a broad social vision that allowed even the non-communist left to make sense of the predatory nature of capitalism. But once the radicals were purged, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We lost our voice. We were integrated into the corporate structures we should have been dismantling.
The ruling class justifies its pillage with the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey points out, “had limited effectiveness as an engine for economic growth” but is successful as “a project to restore class dominance.” It transfers wealth upwards. It consolidates power in the hands of the billionaire class. It is an updated version of the divine right of kings.
Wages under neoliberalism stagnate. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be at least $25 an hour.
Deindustrialization, turbocharged under Bill Clinton, sent industries overseas, where workers are paid slave wages and lack benefits. Some thirty million mass layoffs in the U.S. between 1996 and 2023, according to analysis by the Labor Institute, thrust the working class into economic misery. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair carried out the same assaults in Britain.
Ominously, accompanying this deterioration is the blocking of peaceful avenues for social change, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens Unitedruling, which effectively turned elections over to the billionaire class.
As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. We stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism. If the Trump administration succeeds in rigging or invalidating the midterm elections, the last possible exit door within the political system will be slammed shut.
The evisceration of the rule of law at home is accompanied by the evisceration of the rule of law abroad. The U.S. Empire is a rogue state. It issues bellicose threats to all who defy it, braying like a wild animal. It carries out “preemptive” wars and imposes sanctions on nations that are defiant. It assassinates and kidnaps foreign leaders. It abducts foreign nationals and transports them to black sites where they are tortured and sometimes murdered. It uses its navy to seize merchant vessels and resell their cargo. It bombs nations in open violation of international law. It funds and arms Israel to carry out genocide. It ignores and humiliates its allies and alienates and enrages most of the global community.
This mounting oppression, advanced but not begun by Trump, means we face two stark choices. Tyranny or revolution.
I loathe violence, even when it is exercised in the service of what is seen as a just cause. No one escapes its poison. But it is the oppressor, not the oppressed, who determines the mechanisms of resistance.
The numerous revolutions and insurgencies I covered, including in El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, saw nonviolent protests met with brutal state violence. Resistance movements had no option but to pick up arms.
The nonviolent revolutions I covered in Eastern and Central Europe succeeded not because they were nonviolent, but because the capitalist class benefited from them. The capitalists and oligarchs bought up state industries and assets, as they did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at prices far below their actual value.
The global capitalists permitted the transition to power by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa if the ANC abandoned its Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of state industries and land redistribution. South Africa today has the highest income inequality in the world.
Revolutions that enhance the wealth and power of the capitalist class thrive. Revolutions that do not see blood run in the streets.
We also face a dilemma earlier generations did not — the climate crisis.
The global ruling elites are determined to keep us chained to fossil fuels. They are determined to commodify and exploit the natural world, as well as human beings, to expand profit. They are determined to reconfigure our societies so workers are immiserated and shorn of all power while our masters live in unparalleled luxury and opulence.
The inevitable breakdown of the climate will make larger and larger zones, especially in the Global South, uninhabitable. The waves of climate refugees will become a flood. There will, in response, be no limit to the industrial violence used by the ruling global elites to protect their interests.
The genocide in Gaza is an unequivocal message sent from the industrialized nations of the north, which spent billions to sustain Israel’s mass slaughter, to a global population that subsists on a few dollars a day:
We don’t care about humanitarian law. We don’t care about human rights. Your lives mean nothing to us. We will use any tool, including genocide, to protect our monopoly on wealth and power.
What do we do? How do we resist? Can we halt this descent into madness and mass death?
I am not optimistic.
Those who live in the climate fortresses in the Global North have a material interest in this project, although we are all headed for extinction. Those in the Global North will, I fear, accept a species of totalitarian capitalism in exchange for a degree of security and stability, however temporary.
But this will not be true in the Global South where the ecological crisis and the rule of the global capitalist class pose an existential threat. The Global South will mount insurgencies and revolutions. It will replicate its rebellions of the past, some of which were successful, and some of which, including the insurgencies I covered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Algeria, were crushed.
Revolution, and the possibility of a world freed from the iron grip of global capitalism, will come from these acts of resistance. Let us hope they prevail.
Excellent and spot on! And, yes, absolutely, the UFC cage fight on the White House lawn is gaudy and obscene! And there is a larger picture here. Thank you, as always, Jackson Katz. ―Molly
This Sunday, Trump is hosting a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn.
Some commentators call it harmless fun. Joe Rogan says it’s "so American, so Trump, so crazy." Many liberals have dismissed it as "tacky," and a diversion from important matters.
Here’s my take. This media spectacle is the most high-profile example to date of how Trump’s version of plutocratic populism works – and why he’s kept the support of so many working people. Trump and the GOP can’t give those people higher wages or healthcare.
But he can demonstrate that he sees them and respects them – especially working-class white men, but also men of color. It’s called “cultural recognition.” It’s the same playbook Nixon used in 1972. It’s what Trump does in all of his rally speeches. He does shout-outs to truckers: “We love our truckers, firefighters, coal miners, bikers!” Meanwhile, his actual policies primarily benefit the wealthy.
In this case, he’s putting on an over-the top celebration of violent masculinity in a way that says to men that not only does he value and identify with them. Deep down, he’s even one of ‘em!
This would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic. Trump doesn’t care about the actual material needs of working men! One obvious illustration of the smoke and mirrors nature of this entire event: Rogan himself initially raised concerns about fighter safety in the DC heat before he dropped them. But he helped elect Trump, whose administration has dismantled a range of worker safety regulations across numerous major industries.
I hope men can look beyond the bright lights of the White House spectacle and see through this manipulative BS! And recognize who this president is actually fighting for.
Actual photographs of destruction of White House and lawn
There are so many stunning, heartbreaking images and stories now, day after day, which shine bright light on all this darkness and the reality of a dying empire. Some of the photos coming out are AI generated and certainly symbolize the heartbreaking reality. The other actual photographs that I'm sharing above of so much destruction and desecration are no less disturbing and horrifying.
In sharing these images above, it also needs to be illuminated that Trump is but a symptom of something so much larger than this one malignant narcissist and his fascist administration. He is the poster boy for toxic masculinity and the violence embedded in patriarchy ― which is something that is certainly also the core of UFC and the endorsement and worship of male dominance and violence.
And, yet, so many are fans and pay to watch the brutality of human beings fighting one another. In one form or another, this has been going on for a very, very long time. And it isn't just men, but also women who experience excitement and pleasure in watching the violence that one human being can inflict on another while cheering and waiting breathlessly to see which bloodied body will triumph over the other.
But how did we get here? How is it that our tolerance for causing harm is so high and that the many different faces of violence are so normalized in American culture? In part, I recognize today that there has tragically been a long trajectory enabled by both major political parties and a corporate owned mainstream media which have together brought our nation into the countless horrors that we face today. And there are many layers that go back in time.
If we dive deeper and deeper, we can see how dominator culture rather than one rooted in partnership has long been with us. The wise and courageous Riane Eisler has written brilliantly about this (https://rianeeisler.com/articles-papers/). And then there are the voices like bell hooks who just grabbed me when I first heard her words: "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy." Well, of course! To one degree or another, this is what has impacted us all and back through time.
I believe that it is important for us to understand that it isn't just Trump who is responsible for the nightmares we are now living. This numbing and severance from the wisdom of our hearts and souls began long ago and has often been blindly passed on generation after generation by both our ancestors and also by the culture in which we live.
It is hard to be healthy in an unhealthy culture! And it is, therefore, not surprising that there are countless places where toxic masculinity and the many faces and forms of violence show up. Consequently...
Is it no wonder that a genocide in Gaza has been allowed to continue compliments of American taxpayers who are footing the bill for the bombs annihilating the whole of the Palestinian people?
From this perspective, we can also understand how it is that so many of us are deeply polarized and that dehumanization has become so normalized that millions of Americans support ICE and the brutal immigration practices and policies enacted by both major political parties.
Our disconnect from ourselves also disconnects us from our Earth Mother, causing countless Americans to be oblivious to the climate crisis with its root causes in the burning of fossil fuels and the deadly inaction on transitioning to renewables ― thus enabling this suicidal trajectory that we are on to continue which threatens all of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, endless wars go on and on.
Americans are armed to the teeth while mass shootings continue and children in American schools have to experience active shooter drills.
The United States imprisons more human beings than anywhere else in the world and is the only developed nation to enforce the death penalty.
The US is the only developed country to fail to provide healthcare and as a result millions of Americans go bankrupt or die every year.
We also tragically witness our youth and the American population at large suffering from and experiencing the many symptoms of trauma ― depression and anxiety, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, autoimmune and other illnesses, being the victims or perpetrators of violence, and an enormous array of addictions — to substances, social media, work, exercise, food, sex, shopping, religion, meditation, spiritual bypassing, compulsive cleaning, hoarding, gambling, caretaking, people, pornography, cults, gurus, greed, guns, war, unhealthy relationships, political polarizations, conspiracy theories, image management and perfectionism, anger and chaos, power and control, judgments and dehumanization, mental and emotional states that are dangerous, projections and ideologies of separation rather than connection. And the list goes on. All addictions serve as a distraction from, and as an attempt to cope with, pain and trauma.
Rugged individualism and isolation run rampant in American culture.
Misogyny, racism, homophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism are common place in our nation.
Poverty is experienced by millions in the United States at the same time that the immoral and insane redistribution of wealth upwards continues unabated and to accelerate
Apathy and inaction is common place.
And the list tragically goes on and on...
So it is no wonder that toxic masculinity is showing up on the White House lawn and countless other places ― including in the President of the United States?
If only the vast majority of us could recognize this as a bright light acting as a mirror which is shining on what needs our attention, what needs healing, what needs to be radically transformed in ourselves, our nation, and beyond. Unearthing, recognizing and understanding, and taking responsibility for healing and transforming the shadow side of our country is so very long overdue and vital to the welfare of us all.
As Riane Eisler has wisely said, "Love, caring, and empathy are central to solving the world's problems." May this be what we all increasingly embody. May we be empowered to do the ongoing crucial work of alleviating the suffering in ourselves and our world. And may we do the hard work of recognizing and lowering our tolerance for the many faces of violence. Love is our resistance.
WOW! This piece by my friend Faisal Khan is so excellent, powerful, and horrifyingly true. Thank you, Faisal! These are the facts that we need to see, absorb, and be continuously inspired to act upon in every way humanly possible. Blessed be the truth-tellers!
Failing to individually and collectively recognize, own, heal, and transform the shadow side of America has cost us all dearly. Every day we witness in the United States and beyond how the violence of the past ―that has been with us since the earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples ― continues to play out and haunt us in the present. Nothing can be healed until it is faced. And, indeed, these truths that are so well articulated in my wise and courageous friend's article reveal a reckoning that is long, long overdue. ― Molly
The Unveiled Truth:
A Reckoning Long Overdue
The curtain has been pulled back, the veneer stripped away and suddenly, those who never flinched are flinching. Let us be unambiguous: this nation has not become something different in the last eighteen to twenty months. It has always been this. The hypocrisy is not new. The double standard is not new.
What is new is that the ugliness is now too raw, too visible, too loud to ignore. As Dr. King warned, the greatest purveyor of injustice often wears the costume of the righteous and that costume has been worn by both parties, for decades, without interruption.
The Numbers Don’t Lie and They Don’t Care About Your Party. Healthcare costs in the United States have been crushing working families long before any single administration took credit or deflected blame. In 1984, the average American spent roughly $1,200 per year on healthcare. By 2023, that number had exploded to over $13,000 per person annually, a trajectory that climbed steadily through Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden alike. The average home price in 1980 was around $76,000. By 2024, the national median had surpassed $420,000, while wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained largely stagnant for the bottom 60% of earners since the 1970s. Infrastructure? The American Society of Civil Engineers has given this country a C minus grade, the result of decades of deferred investment, bipartisan neglect, and misplaced priorities. These are not eighteen month failures. These are fifty year decisions compounding into a national crisis.
Wars Without End, Administered by Both Parties. The invasion of Iraq was launched under Bush and sustained under Obama. Libya was bombed and destabilized under Obama. Afghanistan was invaded under Bush, escalated under Obama, and left in ruins after twenty years of bipartisan mismanagement. Syria was bombed under Obama and again under Trump. Yemen has been relentlessly devastated, with American manufactured weapons and American logistical support flowing under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Drone strikes, which became a signature tool of extrajudicial killing, were massively expanded under Obama, who oversaw strikes across Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, often killing civilians and rarely facing accountability.
The occupation and dispossession of Palestinian land, now over seventy seven years deep, has been funded, armed, and diplomatically shielded by every single American administration regardless of party. This is not a red or blue failure. This is an American foreign policy doctrine, consistent, bipartisan, and brutal.
Some have spent the last eighteen months writing passionately about how cruel this country has become, how unrecognizable, how hostile to immigrants and refugees. And yes, the savagery is more unfiltered now, more visceral, more unrestrained than before. But it did not conjure itself out of thin air. Every mechanism, every tool, every infrastructure of control that is being wielded today was already in place, already signed into law, already normalized long before the last general election.
The Patriot Act, one of the most expansive surveillance apparatuses ever built in this country, was signed by George W. Bush and then reauthorized and expanded under Barack Obama. The surveillance of Muslim communities in this country, the monitoring, the infiltration, the profiling, generated barely a whisper of outrage from those who today cannot stop talking about civil liberties. ICE, the detention infrastructure, the deportation pipelines, all of it was built, funded, and refined across multiple administrations. The monster people are horrified by today was not born in the last eighteen months. It was engineered over decades, piece by piece, bill by bill, with bipartisan hands on the drafting table.
What is revealing is not the cruelty itself but who is now suddenly alarmed by it. For years, communities of color, immigrant families, Muslim Americans, and the poor watched this machinery operate against them in plain sight and were met with polite indifference or outright dismissal. Now that the same tools are being turned in broader directions, now that more people feel the cold air of it at their own threshold, the dread has set in. Some have already left the country. Many more say they will. And that choice is understandable but it also tells its own story about who felt insulated enough to remain silent for so long. This did not ferment overnight. It was orchestrated, methodically assembled, and deliberately fortified while too many people were occupied singing the blue song or the red song, persuaded that their team in power meant the machine was a guardian rather than a predator. It was never your guardian. They were simply more calculated about who it was pointed at.
What we are witnessing today is not an anomaly. It is a symptom. A boomerang. Decades of violence exported abroad, of double standards dressed as diplomacy, of occupation rebranded as security, all of it returning home in a form too grotesque to spin. Yes, things have grown more aggressive, more brazen, more naked, but that aggression did not materialize from thin air. Hold Bush accountable. Hold Obama accountable. Hold Biden accountable. Hold them all accountable, because the thread of complicity runs through every administration, every party platform, and every carefully worded press release that said nothing while doing everything.
Before you beat the drum of DNC orthodoxy, before you reduce generations of suffering to eighteen or twenty months of political theater, understand this: selective outrage is not conscience. The propaganda is sharper now. The packaging is more blunt, more raw, more ugly. The rhetoric is more emotionally traumatizing because there is no longer any varnish over it, no careful language softening the blow, no polished spokesperson standing at a podium making devastation sound reasonable. What you are seeing is the same machine operating at full speed with the hood finally open. The noise is louder not because the engine is new, but because nobody is pretending anymore that it was ever built for you.
Until you see this through a genuine lens of honesty, self reflection, and freedom from partisan bias, you are not truly seeing it at all. You are curating an outrage that is comfortable, one that conveniently begins when your party (Democratic) loses power and ends when it regains it.
And let us be direct about credibility: if over the last three years you have not written, posted, spoken, or raised your voice in any meaningful way about the genocide and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory, then your sudden moral urgency rings hollow. It does not matter how many followers you have. It does not matter how many likes your post collects or how many times it gets shared.
Silence during the atrocity and noise during the election cycle is not activism. It is performance. Real conscience does not have a schedule and it does not answer to an algorithm.
On June 5th I went to River View Cemetery in Portland. This would have been my mom's 100th birthday. I brought flowers, complex feelings of grief and gratitude, and the deepest love and compassion for my mother and her struggles and strengths that spanned the 94 years of her lifetime.
I reflected on the truth of the first mother I'd known for most of our lives. This was the mother who had carried layers of unaddressed generational and cultural trauma. This trauma manifested in alcoholism, depression and anxiety, an inability to love or experience compassion, and all of the symptoms of malignant narcissism and other personality disorders. There was a deeply painful impact of my mother's untreated and unhealed trauma on us all through my childhood and beyond ― all of which played a significant role in my twin brother's suicide in 1978, my father's early death at 60 two years earlier, and the symptoms of addictions and PTSD and complex trauma that I experienced.
As I stood in the cemetery at her gravesite, my heart was also broken open once again as I held with conscious awareness the profound miracle of what I call my mother's "partial awakening" that began in 2013 when Mom was 87 years old. This is when my mother was moved to live here in the Pacific Northwest near her family, was treated with antipsychotic and other medications, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and had just enough memory loss to not remember things that she had done that would have been unbearable, and that she began to experience an immersion in the love of family ― most of all, my love. This is when my second mom was born. A mother who was capable of receiving and giving love.
This miracle was never supposed to be possible. Moving from "I hate you!" to gazing into my eyes and calling me her "precious darling" was never, ever something I thought could happen. It simply cannot be overstated what an incredible experience of profound grace that it was to bare witness to just enough of an opening into my mother's heart for there to be a channel to love. For the first time. Tears....
Gratefully, I had first engaged in years of addressing, healing, unburdening, and transforming so many layers of my own trauma. If I hadn't, I would have gone down with all of the bitterness and blame, fears and shame, grief and rage, plethora of addictions and endless trauma triggers, and delusions of separation and unworthiness and unlovability that had for so very long been unknowingly and blindly passed down generation after generation. And I would not have been capable of loving my mom, this mother who had once been so brutal. And a second mother would never have been born. Without doing this deep work of healing my own trauma, I would have remained cut off from the wisdom of my heart.
Today I recognize that underneath all of the flailing about, all of the delusions and harm and violence that humans can perpetrate on ourselves and others is this indwelling core Self. I have been moved to share this eloquent quote from Mark Nepo many times who describes our Self in this way — “Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.”
For 87 years my mother's connection with her Self was severed, something that happened to her as a tiny vulnerable child. Today I understand that this is what she had to do to survive. And the cost of this estrangement from the wholeness and beauty of who she truly is was profound.
Then, beginning in 1983 my mom and I teamed up in a conspiracy grounded in Love, the most powerful medicine of all. And the impossible became possible.
This is rare for someone as narcissistic and as devastatingly wounded and traumatized as my mother had been. But together we did this. It wasn't just my love for her that made all the difference. And it wasn't only the medications and memory loss that made this miracle possible. It was also the courage, the wisdom, the strength and power of love that had always been inside of my mother, seeded in her heart and soul... but buried through so much of her life. But it was always there — this core that cannot be wounded, this Center of our Love.
Our last seven years together is something that I will always treasure with all of my heart and soul. And this is what I remember and cherish most of all.
Miracles are possible. And we humans can find our way back into the wholeness of who we truly are. This cannot be done in isolation. We need the support of others who are also rooted into a path of awakening from our delusions, addictions, and the ways that we have been wounded in life. And we need the courage and commitment to healing and opening our hurting hearts enough to experience the power and the Grace of Love.
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