I’ve been thinking about our situation. How can I describe it? What condition are we familiar with, through personal experience or observation?
Emotional and physical abuse instantly come to mind. It’s on the news all the time, crime, exploitation, and political violence. It struck me that this trauma is very akin to family abuse. A parent takes charge of the family and coerces everyone else to yield to his/her whims. There is neither love nor respect for the family or its members. It is cruelty with the goal of breaking the wills of the victim and family.
But how is the United States a family? Our members come from around the world, representing a vast number of cultures, languages and beliefs. We don’t even look alike.
Yet, we are physically related, and we do look alike. Any differences are insignificant compared to the huge number of similarities. We humans are cousins. We can trace our heritage back1 to to a single woman and man that are the sources of our genes. It was a process that took hundreds of thousands of years. During which disasters nearly wiped out the existing humans several times, pruning the human tree. Each time the survivors carried a smaller gene pool, narrowing the diversity of our ancestors. There was no primal couple. Adam and Eve occurred at different times, tens of thousands of years apart. They were survivors of multiple environmental culling.
What about the United States? Physically, we are relatives, no matter where we come from. And we have formed a nation, a specific culture. Nations are families. In a democracy we structure our family by voting people into family positions. Idyllically, at the top is President and Vice President, who are our chosen parents. The Supreme Court are our wise selected grandparents who guide the entire family on what is appropriate. Our courts moderate family behavior. They look to guarantee fairness and harmony. Think of the House of Representatives and Senate as our agreed on aunts and uncles. All responsible for the well-being of the rest of us. Our Aunts and Uncles are the people we elect to represent us. They organize and evaluate our concerns and what we need and how to get it done. When functioning properly, each level of government feels an obligation to treat everyone else with respect and dignity.
Our national family is not hierarchical. No one is born into leadership. Ideally, we choose them because of their merit. How well have they served all of the members of our immense family? History has shown us that some of us claim special privileges to which they are not deserving. They act for their own good at the expense of the rest of our family.
Why should they show all of us respect and earnestly listen to our concerns?
Because they are us, elected from us to serve us. No one is special or above the rest. The elected representatives have been given an awesome responsibility to do what promotes harmony and success for the entire family. Their task is to make sure every member has the resources they need. They offer support for each person to achieve their best. No one is guaranteed success, but everyone is guaranteed the resources and support to try. Everyone knowing that they are equal to one another, treated fairly, and respected.
Today our family is being abused. Some of those we’ve elected have, because of emotional illness, become classic abusers.
When there is abuse, there is violence, psychological and physical. The goals of an abuser are to intimidate, isolate, and impoverish their victims.
I worked for about nine years in adult psychiatric hospitals and youth treatment centers. I grew to know many people who were child abusers, wife beaters, and murderers. I also knew broken folks who had been on the receiving end of the abuse. In fact, many of the abusers, beaters, and murderers also suffered terrible abuse. It was something both the attackers and victims share.
In the case of family abuse, the pattern of intimidation, isolation, and impoverishment is almost universal.
Today, Trump, Musk, and the GOP are enacting this pattern on our American Family. They act arbitrarily with frequent vague edicts that cause confusion and fear. They frequently call names and threaten people. They encourage people to behave aggressively. This is cruelty and intimidation.
Cruelty is a mental sickness that poisons everyone.
An abuser drives away friends and family, blocking emotional support and other perspectives of the situation. The trauma of emotional and physical abuse wears down the victim. They use their energy to endure rather than fight back. They become hopeless, seeing no way out. Trump, Musk, and the GOP have isolated us from our friends and allies. They have quit treaties and insulted our neighbors. The are trying to wall off the rest of the world. Russia and China are examples of what happens to people cut off from humanity. The bestial treatment of Russian troops by their officers and Putin results in their slaughter in the hundreds of thousands.
Trump, Musk, and some in the GOP echo the same lies. Putin tells these lies to his Russia and the rest of the world. Russia continues to feed masses of people, military and civilian, into the meat grinder. All because of lies, that our leadership is now telling us.
And Trump, Musk and the GOP are attacking the time-honored idea of American security, economic, health and military. The wife beater takes control of the family budget. This further isolates the victim by denying resources to act in their own defense. Without money we will end up on the street, reduced to invisibility and prone to cruelty.
What do we first think when we see someone living under a bridge? What do we think when they are in a tent encampment or walking the street with a cart full of their ragged belongings? Most often it is not compassion. We’ve been trained to be repelled by these lost souls. We’ve been trained to instantly think, what’s wrong with them? It is only after that, when our empathy kicks in. If it does at all. Only then we start to see what cruelty and neglect has done to our family members.
That’s where we are now. The United States is in the grip of some very sick people. Abused children who are now broken adults. Their aim is cruelty. They want ultimate life and death control. They are abusers who want to intimidate, isolate, and impoverish us. They want to shatter our precious family. They want to feed on our pain.
Background
I have been fascinated about who we are. I have also wondered where we came from since I was first exposed to the biblical story of Genesis. Once I began to discover Science the story of our origins and evolution became one of my life-long passions. Even as a child, I saw Genesis as a myth. It didn’t make sense. As I grew older and studied the Bible, I found the Old Testament increasingly insulting. Its simplistic implications were shocking. Its arbitrariness and cruelty were disturbing. In turn the New Testament was contaminated by the the ancient nonsense. It took years, but eventually I found the grains of truth. They were hidden in the sands of desert superstition.
02/25/2025 Edited for clarity.
Compiled and initially analyzed with Perplexity.AI, Deep Research