Last week we covered how being nice to abusers makes them more abusive. This week we’ll go over how being nice turns nice people into victims.
How Being Nice Lets Bad People Win, part 3
Let’s move this discussion to a personal level.
Let’s say you’re dating this absolutely wonderful person. Everything is sparkly rainbows and Pegasus Unicorns delivering everything to your house. Then one day, he makes a racist comment about one of your friends. Your friend isn’t there. It’s just the two of you. You give him a quizzical look, and he starts laughing, saying it was just a joke.
Because it was just one little joke, and everything else is all glitter and puppies, you brush it off. Everybody is allowed to make some mistakes, or make some jokes. It’s a reasonable thought. When dealing with reasonable people, that is.
Then he’ll escalate. Maybe by making other racist comments. He might start some misogyny, such as trying to make you more feminine, bully you into having a child with him, or criticize how you dress for work. Maybe he’ll demand so much of your time that you let things slide at work, and voila, he can tell you how women are made to stay at home. Or blame you for not taking care of him properly, financially speaking.
But it’s all just for fun, he says. He wouldn’t actually do those things. He doesn’t actually believe them. They’re just funny things to say because he loves to get a rise out of people. Like Rush Limbaugh.
After you’ve been in the relationship for a few years, you have no friends. You have no life out of the house, and work, and him. And you feel like you’re constantly walking around on eggshells. Everytime you try to call out his behavior, it’s met with verbal, physical, and/or emotional violence. Heavy on the and.
What he learned is that he can do anything. He can say anything. This first racist, ahem, joke, was to gauge how difficult it will be to tear you down. Are you so vested in being nice that you won’t push back? Can he negate your morals to the point of actually supporting his abhorrent behavior?
And what you’ve learned is that you’re a victim. Most likely you can add the word “again” after that. You’re the victim again. You wonder why this keeps happening. You give up on dating because all the good men are gay or taken or both. Or dead. Or fictional. My bet’s on those hot, amazingly tender and thoughtful men in those romance novels you love so much.
Anywayz.
You may not have learned how you’re enabling this behavior.
Continuing with this hypothetical relationship as an example, you may have forgotten the jokes that snuck in between the glittery rainbows. The only thing you can recall is that this happened overnight, about six months after you started dating. But you stuck around because, well, Pegasus Unicorn DoorDash delivery.
And this is how playing nice fucks everything and everyone up.
You blame yourself for his bad behavior, because, afterall, you’re just too nice and thoughtful. You’d hate to appear in the AITA (am I the asshole) subreddit. My golly gosh sakey darns, the embarrassment alone is unspeakable!
So rather than growing some healthy boundaries, and learning to stick up for yourself, you put yourself squarely into the permanent victim zone because society will judge you harshly otherwise. You. Not the narcissist. You.
He can go find another victim. In fact, he probably already has one waiting in the wings. He’s probably told her that they’re just friends and how he’s your emotional support, and he’d hate to leave you in such a mess.
You’ll be alone with your feelings and perceived inadequacies. Your shame, your guilt, your depression, your anxiety, or however you get stuck expressing it.
But we were also covering how this plays out in our politics, correct?
Ok. Did you read how Biden’s under investigation now for classified documents found in his office after his vice presidency? Yeah. That.
Tя☭ᴍ₽ can hoard dozens of boxes of documents, burn some, maybe even bury some within an ex-wife’s casket, buried in his golf course. (Just ignore that she was cremated after dying under mysterious circumstances less than 24 hours before a deposition.) And the DOJ basically goes, huh. That’s not good. Movin’ on.
Biden may have had classified documents seven years ago in an office he hasn’t used in four years, and the DOJ is like, “Alert! Alert! Must investigate!”
And if we borrow Qonservatives’ phrasing, it’s his DOJ.
But why would this happen? Well, let’s take a look at niceness.
Tя☭ᴍ₽ is nice. If you’re tall, thin, blonde, and look like Ivanka. And let him grab your coochie. But then he’s not nice by telling everyone about how it happened, smearing your reputation all over the place for being too easy or something. Or worse, he’ll spew all kinds of horrible terms because you didn’t take him up on his advances.
Biden, on the other hand, is nice. Like, nicely nice. There’s no confrontation to investigating him because he knows he’s either innocent and this will be proven, or he knows he deserves to be held accountable for those actions, and welcomes the discourse.
But that’s not how the wrong-wing f’idiots will spin this. Nope. He’s being investigated because he’s a bad, bad man, and no one is above the law, not even a President.
Just don’t point out the inconsistencies with the notion of investigating Saint Tя☭ᴍ₽.
Biden will be convicted in their Monkey Dung Qourt well before the DOJ has even assigned an agent.
Because he’s nice, he won’t call them out on their stupidity or their lies. He’ll brush it under the rug that’s got so much crap under it that we should be taking bets on when a mild breeze will lift an edge, and filth starts spewing out.
And so Biden, and by extension the Democratic Party and Democratic voters, are victims of Biden’s being nice. We’re ridiculed and harangued at family or work events for being sheeple who are too stupid to do our own research.
If we respond nicely or with anything resembling logic, they’ll respond with sneers or epithets. If we respond with something not nice, they’ll gloat about getting the better of us, about how they were able to twist us in knots.
If we simply disengage, then we’re branded as cowards because they’re so vested in being abusive that even this makes them feel powerful. While we hem & haw about feelings, they say they’re better off without us, and ha ha, whatta snowflake.
No matter what, they win. Or at least they perceive themselves as winners. The Secret is working perfectly. They’ve attracted an abundance of winning, and all they had to do was trust their pastor, who said gawd wants Tя☭ᴍ₽ to be president for life.
Yeah. Nice fucking sucks. I hate nice.
So next week we’ll go over some things we might be able to do to address this nice problem. See you then!
Wanna check out the rest of this series?
Hopelessness Hurts 