This follows up on this:
The Dry-Drunk Fever Dreamers Destroying Everything Around Us
It ain't hard to spot and we should be blunt in naming it. We’ve been trained out of doing so by a re-education camp form of politesse that calls such a vicious lack of self-control a painful life struggle. It’s not. It’s weakness and a taste for cruelty either protected by other people’s decency or recognized by the indecent as useful energy.
I couldn’t let it go. Ain’t we required to rebuke evil? The old sleep less at night than they used to and I need every second of rest I can get. It bit and scratched at me, my silence.
And I need to keep my dignity too, and my discretion and balance while I speak out for justice. You’d think someone could bundle them all into one handy package. I’d have to do it myself despite my unmatched talent for fumble-fingeredness.
Finally I itched it out of my brain, the right way to go. What helped was revisiting the guy’s Substack; he made his wretched self even worse with his follow-up post to his first.
So this is the comment I left:
“Shame on you, truly.”
He can delete it, he can block this Bad Fairy. She ain’t anyone meaningful in the least little way to him. He can mock and dismiss her as a troll. Others do; I ain’t in the least suffering from any bit of their disregard.
It’ll be fine, because these things, words from an insignificant anonymous stranger he’ll likely never encounter in the actuals but saying something maybe nobody ever said to him before, saying it starkly and clearly, letting him make of it as he will—these four words ain’t all that easy to delete from an endlessly-ruminating type of brain and I’m pretty sure he’s got one. They’ll be with him forever now, they’ll catch him unexpectedly in an insomniac moment, they’ll enrage him maybe one time when he’s stuck in traffic. He’ll never be able to winkle them out of his head.
I myself don’t feel fully and entirely better but at least I can look at myself quite calmly in the mirror now and I got one less thing I might need to be rebuked for failing at by a Higher Authority later.
> "So this is the comment I left:
'Shame on you, truly.' ..."
So, pray tell, where did you leave that comment? Of maybe some use to those in the peanut gallery, the jury box, or the docket.
Though, offhand, it reminds me of a fellow I met at University -- lo, these 5 or 6 decades ago -- yclept "Shameless Nightingale". Quite a scene, surprised I survived it, more or less.
Often wondered, as I have over the intervening years, why a nightingale should ever be ashamed in the first place, certainly not for a come-hither song, though not all songs are crested equal.
But same old story, the fight for love and glory, such as they are or may be.