Rabid Rebeccably Numb
- Going Rebecca -
August 13th, 2004
Did you feel for the Westminster Mayor when he was tied down and had the Rabid Rebecca attack dog baying and chewing at him at every Council Meeting and street corner in Westminster?
Did reading the Carroll Sun’s shallow and content-less stories and hearing the rumor mongering make you sick?
Or were you like most folks – engaged by the drama, entertained by the scent of scandal, yet comfortably numb about the whole thing? If you have a version of this story – well, then you are part of this story. What did you care – it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.
Many have replaced empathy with an “I”-centered sentimentality.
What is in this community for me?
Feeling has been turned on its head: caring is now a means not for taking action, but for feeling better about oneself or getting attention as long as we can explain it away as “politics.”
We ride the emotional dramas in the Carroll Sun tabloid, wear colored ribbons, and express our love for God and country.
May we all now bow our heads and say “the Lord’s Prayer”. Now we can all enjoy the twice monthly soap opera that the meetings of the Westminster Common Council have degenerated into – and perhaps, even keep score. It’s funny – like watching a bus accident.
Meanwhile, we take no action – at least none driven by empathy. Besides – it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.
Empathy is how we respond to the plight of humanity. It is the bedrock of our moral sensibility that allows us to feel for others, to put ourselves in their place. If you cannot feel, how can you act outside your own wants and desires?
To many today, it seems easier to just deny feelings of empathy, to react to them “rationally” as a weakness in this hard and fast world. Anyway - it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.
But this has a cost. Losing feeling for others, or never developing the capacity to feel deeply at all, means closing off a fundamental part of being a community.
On a global scale, we feel less not just about the millions of innocent people killed by traffic accidents and drugs and violence in the past decade, or the thousands of deaths portrayed on the television.
We have also become desensitized and numb about our own partners, neighbors, community leaders or parents. We joke about concepts such as “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Hey, whatever, it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.
What most folks have not understood is that Rabid Rebecca is a virus in our community and like mad cow disease – ‘Going Rebecca’ is a plague upon our community.
Rabid Rebecca Disease is a virus that cares not about its host organism.
When the Westminster Mayor continued to Zen the Rabid Rebecca – he denied her the very food that an hysteric virus feeds upon – reaction and words.
Fed by others who enjoyed her theatrics and enabled her, she then, in the famous words of Abigail Adams, became the famous well fed snake that turned to bite the very folks who had fed her. Tis a pity. Oh well, anyway, let’s hope that is not you that she is going after.
It can now be understood that a major attribute of Rabid Rebecca Disease, otherwise known as Councilmatic Disorder is that the person Going Rebecca sees a vast difference in the reality that is based on what the afflicted sees, hears, and feels - and the conditioned reality of what the afflicted has been socialized to understand – as fed by the snake-feeders.
The virus infected mind is driven towards the delusional based on the afflicted’s perception of reality. The afflicted is driven to shorten the gap between his or her perception of their concept of the delusional truth - and conditioned reality. When the gap becomes too great the afflicted will see the conditioned reality as beyond repair and he or she endeavors to destroy it. But certainly it not you that she is attempting to go after, or is it?
In the process of feeding Rebecca, one becomes less human. The snake feeders explain it away as politics. They care not becomes of the community left moribund as a result of her behavior because they do not care about the community – only about themselves or what benefit they chance to gain as a result of their parasitic behavior towards the community.
As this happens, the parasitic snake feeders not only stop feeling the pain of others, they become proscriptive and only more capable of inflicting it. This is the darkest side of empathy’s erosion. If feelings underlie an empathic response, numbness makes brutality viable. Thus, as you happily switch off from humanity, you become a threat to it.
We were comfortably numb about the attempted torture of the Westminster Mayor, and so were the Council members and other interested parties that facilitated the behavior and fed this snake-virus in our community. Those who have participated won’t say they are sorry because they don’t feel sorry.
Simple as that. After all, you don’t have any feelings – it’s only politics.
And if we ourselves, can’t feel for the community and others, who will feel for us?
Perhaps this is part of the general worsening of mental well-being. As a recent World Health Organization study shows, there’s a near-perfect correlation between the rise of alienation in the modern world and the decline of people’s mental states, with mental dysfunction growing globally.
As empathy falls, behaviors predicated on its lack have been pathologized, like narcissistic and antisocial personalities. But these are not symptoms of organic disease. Instead, it is the social system that is in need of radical treatment. “It’s only politics and it is not me that she is going after” is a social disease, often the victim does not know that they have it.
Medicating our numbness, by explaining that it is only politics is one thing, with a long and lonely history. But a culture medicating itself into comfortable numbness and explaining away politically motivated apotheosis patheosis is something else. Fortunately there is an anecdote – allow the Rabid Rebecca to feed herself to the point that she explodes.
The only part left to this Kabuki Morals play is to watch the very persons who created this monster now portray themselves a victim of the monster and heroically place themselves in the position of coming to the rescue of the very community that they continue to parasitically victimized.
KED / August 13th, 2004
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Maryland Governor spends the day at the Maryland State Fair 
Many have replaced empathy with an “I”-centered sentimentality.