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kamreadsandrecs · 1 year

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by Adam Kirsch

In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Michiko Kakutani’s in the New York Times, which Batuman quotes:

“Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining” made Ms. Kakutani “want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the 70’s in New York and going to Harvard.”

It’s a typically canny moment in a novel that strives to seem artless. Batuman clearly recognizes that every criticism of Wurtzel’s bestseller—narcissism, privilege, triviality—could be applied to Either/Or and its predecessor, The Idiot, right down to the authors’ shared Harvard pedigree. Yet her protagonist resists the identification, in large part because she doesn’t see herself as Wurtzel’s contemporary. Wurtzel was born in 1967 and Batuman in 1977. This makes both of them members of Generation X, which includes those born between 1965 and 1980. But Selin insists that the ten-year gap matters: “Generation X: that was the people who were going around being alternative when I was in middle school.”

I was born in 1976, and the closer we products of the Seventies get to fifty, the clearer it becomes to me that Batuman is right about the divide—especially when it comes to literature. In pop culture, the Gen X canon had been firmly established by the mid-Nineties: Nirvana’s Nevermind appeared in 1991, the movie Reality Bites in 1994, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995. Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which popularized the term, was published in 1991. And the novel that defined the literary generation, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, when David Foster Wallace was about to turn thirty-four—technically making him a baby boomer.

Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s.

In particular, Smith is interested in how the case challenges the views of her protagonist, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is a woman with the sharp judgment and keen perceptions of a novelist, though her era has deprived her of the opportunity to exercise those gifts. Her surname—pronounced in the French style, touché—evokes her taste for intellectual combat. But she has spent her life in a supportive role, serving variously as housekeeper and bedmate to her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a man of letters who churns out mediocre historical romances by the yard. (Like most of the novel’s characters, Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real-life historical figures.)

Now middle-aged, Eliza finds herself drawn into public life by the Tichborne saga, which has divided the nation and her household as bitterly as any of today’s political controversies. Like all good celebrity trials, the case had many supporting players and intricate subplots, but at heart it was a question of identity: Was the man known as “the Claimant” really Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat believed to have died in a shipwreck some fifteen years earlier? Or was he Arthur Orton, a cockney butcher who had emigrated to Australia, caught wind of the reward on offer from Roger’s grief-stricken mother, and seized the chance of a lifetime? In the end, a jury decided that he was Orton, and instead of inheriting a country estate he wound up in a jail cell. What fascinates Smith, though, is the way the Tichborne case became a political cause, energizing a movement that took justice for “Sir Roger” to be in some way related to justice for the common man.

Eliza is a right-minded progressive who was active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. Proud of her judgment, she sees many problems with the Claimant’s story and finds it incredible that anyone could believe him. To her dismay, however, she lives with someone who does. William’s new wife, Sarah, formerly his servant, sees the Claimant as a victim of the same establishment that lorded over her own working-class family. The more she is informed of the problems with the Claimant’s argument, the more obdurate she becomes: “HE AIN’T CALLED ARTHUR ORTON IS HE,” she yells, “THEM WHO SAY HE’S ORTON ARE LYING.”

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed father.

Though much of the novel deals with the case and the history of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it is first and foremost the story of Eliza Touchet, and how her exposure to the trial alters her sense of the world and of herself. “The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open,” she reflects, and it is this ability to see things from another perspective that makes her a novelist manqué.

Open-mindedness, even to the point of moral ambiguity, is one of the chief values Smith shares with her literary contemporaries. These writers grew up during a period of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, then took their first steps toward adult consciousness just as the Cold War concluded. They came of age in the brief period that Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”

Fukuyama’s description, famously premature though it was, still captures something crucial about the context in which the children of the Seventies began to think and write. While the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is sometimes remembered as the “Revolutions of 1989,” the mood it created in the West was hardly revolutionary. After 1989, there was little of the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” sentiment that had animated Wordsworth during the French Revolution. Instead, the ambient sense that history was moving steadily in the right direction encouraged writers to see politics as less urgent, and less morally serious, than inward experience.

In the fiction that defined the pre-9/11 era, political phenomena tended to assume cartoon form. Wallace’s Infinite Jest features an organization of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—that is, the Wheelchair Assassins. In Smith’s White Teeth, one of the main characters joins a militant group named KEVIN, for Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the war on terror would put an end to jokes like these, but for a decade or so it was possible to see ideological extremism as a relic fit for spoofing—as with KGB Bar, a popular New York literary venue that opened in 1993.

For the young writers of that era, the most important battles were not being fought abroad but at home, and within themselves. Their enemies were the forces of cynicism and indifference that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest, set in a near-future America stupefied by consumerism, mass entertainment, and addictive substances. The great balancing act of Wallace’s fiction was to truthfully represent this stupor while holding open the possibility that one could recover from it, the way the residents of the novel’s Ennet House manage to recover from their addictions. This dialectical mission is responsible for the spiraling self-consciousness that is the most distinctive (and, to some readers, the most annoying) aspect of his writing.

Dave Eggers set himself an analogous challenge in his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Writing about a childhood tragedy—the nearly simultaneous deaths from cancer of his mother and father, which left the young Eggers with custody of his eight-year-old brother—he aimed to do full justice to his despair while still insisting on the validity of hope. “This did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you,” he writes,

there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart!

By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in 1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying inequality.

If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage, and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred cell of cynicism.

This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age. Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since 2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

The children of the Seventies tend to feel out of place in this new world. It’s not that they naïvely looked forward to a future of peace and harmony and are offended to find that it has not materialized. It is rather that their literary gaze was fixed within at an early age, and they continue to believe that the most authentic way to write about history is as the deteriorating climate through which the self moves.

The self, meanwhile, they approach with mistrust—a reaction against the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of their elders. Many of them have turned to autofiction, a genre which is often criticized as narcissistic—a way of shrinking the world to fit into the four walls of the writer’s room. In fact, it has served these writers as an antidote to the grandiosity of memoir, which tends to falsify in the direction of self-flattery—as this generation learned from the spectacular implosion of James Frey’s 2003 bestseller, A Million Little Pieces. By admitting from the outset that it is not telling the truth about the author’s life, autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide. That makes it useful for writers who are not in search of goodness, neither within themselves nor in political movements.

For Sheila Heti, this resistance to goodness takes the form of artistic introspection, which busier people tend to judge as selfish and idle. In How Should a Person Be?, from 2010, a character named Sheila has dinner with a young theater director named Ben, who has just returned with a friend from South Africa. “It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works economically,” he says of their trip, that he now wonders whether his work as a theater director—“a very narcissistic activity”—is morally justifiable. Yet nothing could be more narcissistic, in Heti’s telling, than such moral preening, and Sheila instinctively resists it. “They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality,” she complains. She loathes the idea of having “to wear on the outside one’s curiosity, one’s pity, one’s guilt,” when art is concerned with what happens inside, which can only be observed with effort and in private. “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people,” she tells herself. “It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.”

Teju Cole’s 2011 novel Open City offers a more ambivalent version of the same idea. Julius, the narrator, can’t justify his aesthetic self-absorption on the grounds that he is an artist, as Sheila does, since he is a psychiatrist. It’s an ironic choice of profession for a man we come to know as guarded and aloof. Cole builds a portrait of Julius through his daily interactions with other people, like the taxi driver whose cab he enters gruffly. “The way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver rebukes him. “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” Julius apologizes for this small breach of solidarity, but insincerely: “I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”

Indeed, for most of the novel he is alone, meditating in Sebaldian fashion on the atrocities of history as he takes long walks through Manhattan. When, during a trip to Brussels, he meets a man who wants to intervene in history—Farouq, a young Moroccan intellectual who declares that “America is a version of Al-Qaeda”—Julius is decidedly unimpressed:

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

Open City can’t be said to endorse Julius’s aesthetic solipsism. On the contrary, the last chapter finds him trapped on a fire escape outside Carnegie Hall in the rain, a striking symbol of a man isolated by culture. Just moments before, he had been united with the rest of the audience in Mahlerian rapture; now, he reflects, “my fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight,” as he tries to avoid slipping and falling to his death. The scene is Cole’s acknowledgment that aesthetic consciousness remains passive and solipsistic even when experienced in common, and that danger demands a different kind of solidarity—one that is active, ethical, even political. Yet Cole conjures Julius’s aristocratic fatalism in such intimate detail that the “Rejoice! Believe!” approach—to literature, and to life—can only appear childish.

Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future. In her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Heti tells the story of a woman named Mira whose grief over her father’s death prompts her to speculate about what Judaism calls the world to come. In Heti’s vision, this is not a place to which the soul repairs after death, nor is it some kind of revolutionary political arrangement; rather, it is an entirely new world that God will one day create to replace the one we live in, which she calls “the first draft of existence.”

The hardest thing to accept, for Heti’s protagonist, is that the end of our world will mean the disappearance of art. “Art would never leave us like a father dying,” Mira says. “In a way, it would always remain.” But over the course of Pure Colour, she comes to accept that even art is transitory. In a profoundly self-accusing passage, she concludes that a better world might even require the disappearance of art, since

art is preserved on hearts of ice. It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds.

Tao Lin’s unnerving, affectless autofiction leaves a rather different impression than Heti’s, and he has sometimes been identified as a voice from the next generation, the millennials. But his 2021 novel Leave Society shows him thinking along similar lines as the children of the Seventies. In Taipei, from 2013, Lin’s alter ego is named Paul, and he spends most of the novel joylessly eating in restaurants and taking mood-altering drugs. In Leave Society he is named Li, but he is recognizably the same person, perched on a knife-edge between extreme sensitivity and neurotic withdrawal. In the interim, he has decided that the cure for his troubles, and the world’s, lies in purging the body of the toxins that infiltrate it from every direction.

Like Heti, Lin anticipates a great erasure. All of recorded history, he writes, has been merely a “brief, fallible transition . . . from matter into the imagination.” Sometime soon we will emerge into a universe that bears no resemblance to the one we know. Writers, Lin concludes, participate in this process not by working for social change but by reforming the self. “Li disliked trying to change others,” Lin writes, and believed that “people who are concerned about evil and injustice in the world should begin the campaign against those things at their nearest source—themselves.”

One way or another, writers in this cohort all acknowledge the same injunction—even the ones who struggle against it. In his new book of poems, The Lights, Ben Lerner strives to elaborate an idea of redemption that is both private and social:

I don’t know any songs, but won’t withdraw. I am dreaming the pathetic dream of a pathos capable of redescription, so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction. A dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.

The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being “a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without celebrating it.

Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles Dickens.

When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud, appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet of things.”

But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

Smith’s affinity for Forster owes something to their analogous historical situations. An Edwardian liberal who lived into the age of fascism and communism, Forster defended his values—“tolerance, good temper and sympathy,” as he put it in the 1939 essay “What I Believe”—with something of a guilty conscience, recognizing that the militant younger generation regarded them as “bourgeois luxuries.”

At the end of The Fraud, Eliza encounters Mr. Bogle’s son Henry, who has grown disgusted with his father’s quietism and become a political radical. He reproaches her for being more interested in understanding injustice than in doing something about it, proclaiming:

By God, don’t you see that what young men hunger for today is not “improvement” or “charity” or any of the watchwords of your Ladies’ Societies. They hunger for truth! For truth itself! For justice!

This certainty and urgency is the opposite of keeping one’s mind open, and while Mrs. Touchet—and Smith—aren’t prepared to say that it is wrong, they are certain that it’s not for them: “This essential and daily battle of life he had described was one she could no more envisage living herself than she could imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon.”

Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.

#zadie smith #writing #books

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kammartinez · 1 year

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by Adam Kirsch

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

#zadie smith #books #writing

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obsolete-fear · 2 years

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First Mornings

The first morning I spent on Prozac, I made a quiche.

Not because I was hungry, or because I had any particularly relevant ingredients- I used pepperoni and chopped lettuce and many tiny ends of cheeses- but because I realized that I could be a person who loved the world

The morning- though I apply that term loosely- I spent after she said that she was leaving, I was too queasy to drink, and praised my body for its temperance.

I met up with a friend who let me speak my piece and made me eat and be in company. He helped me remember that I can still learn to love this world.

The first morning we woke up together, we walked downstairs glowing, two twin suns, and found our housemate in equally good spirits, making breakfast.

We shared coffee and bacon and cinnamon rolls, and knew that we loved the world.

The only morning we woke up on opposite sides of the bed, I was afraid that we had fought, and you were afraid that we had fought, and neither of us considered your bad back or the unseasonably warm weather.

Every morning since, there’s been no reason for that fear, and on mornings that I find it hard to love the world, because capitalism is cruel, because I cannot learn correctly for my exams, because I have a lecture on another genocide at 10, because it’s cold, because I have too much to do in too few hours, because I’m simply tired, and don’t think I’ll ever stop being tired, when all of these reasons keep me from loving the world as I ought, I am still able to wake up and I am still able to love.

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xmistyriversx · 3 years

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Make Wave

It's Monday morning, I slept two hours last night and I'm wide awake, full of energy ready to roll. It feels a little weird, seems suspicious, impossible for me to be this ready to go especially for a Monday, especially when I haven't slept right in over a week... I start to think back, when was the last time I slept a full night? I count back days... Sunday, no Saturday, no, Friday, nope, Thursday, no, Wednesday, no, Tuesday, no, Monday, maybe.. but it was medically induced... So wait oh yeah, I took nyquil Monday because I hadn't been sleeping for a few days... fuck. The day went on and I felt fine, honestly just happy go lucky. I'm just not used to being happy... but afternoon sets in and I start to get tired. It's a relief for sure but I've been tired and not slept a few of these days. People need sleep... this isn't normal... can I make this stop? Even if I sedate myself for the night will I come out of this? So I google some stuff, remind myself what mania, hypomania is. I start reading the list of key symptoms and as I get to the bottom realizing every single one completely checks out I get annoyed. It feels like a slap in the face, a confirmation I am fucked in the head. It's not really news, but it reminds me I'm stuck with this label. I prefer to think of it as personality traits so it hurts to know it's a medical condition, that there's something wrong with me. As I read the symptom list I recount my actions to figure out what adds up. I remember being a little concerned mid way through the week, figuring out what was going on but laughing it off like it wasn't. I wasn't doing anything too crazy at first, but I certainly was having a lot of fun. I talked to my brother on the phone for two hours Wednesday night, not normal. He called me out saying he thought I had a touch of mania, I don't deny it I realize I was motor mouth on the phone but that's just a mood I have sometimes... I even admitted to my cousin that night that if I was too hyper, pacing back and forth while on the phone, talking nonstop, and if I didn't get good sleep by tomorrow night we needed to start being a little concerned and to keep me in check. The next day I justified everything though, I'm just happy, I'm not used to being happy it's fine. My meds are working and I'm just not used to it so it's messing with my sleep a little bit and I just slept for a week when I had COVID so I'm just not tired.... I remember being angry at my brother annoyed that he thinks I'm crazy. Thinking that everyone just thinks I'm crazy because I go to therapy and take medicine and they're all fucked. Let me be happy. I continue recounting my week and become more annoyed that my actions line up with the symptoms. I'm only annoyed because I feel called out, insisting there's something wrong with me. Because that's the thing this is ME. It's not a surprise its just an annoyance, but I made my decision awhile ago to live like this it just catches up sometimes gets me off guard. I didn't do a single thing I didn't want to do all week. I was and still am extremely happy. I remind myself how I've gone over this already, my mood my many many moods and how I love it about myself. That's the truth I love it almost all of the time, enough that I wouldn't change it. I remind myself of my decisions, that nothing is easy and I chose the possibility of being a little wild and the trade off of sometimes sad. When my doctor told me I could go back on prozac and this might happen, I needed to decided if dealing with some "side effects" (extra mood swings) was worth it. I need to give this more time and chance. I can't get scared and give up on the meds that make me happy make me able to be me... It is scary though, the inevitable the crash. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction... every high has an equal and opposite low.. and then I really realize why I've been in denial I don't want to think about the low coming. I mean I know it's coming, but I keep it out of my head. Ride the wave while I can enjoy it. It's not an absolute

guarantee the crash is that bad... I know how to swim. I have been through this before, and I get freaked out when the ride comes to an end unsure if we'll land it or come crashing down. I'm better at riding the wave and not letting myself be scared of what's to come. I don't want to waste the fun time in worry I want to enjoy it. So maybe I'll crash, maybe I check all the fucking boxes for some stupid mental illness, maybe I like it. Everything comes with a trade off, I chose this and I'm not going back on it. So I'll try to calm myself down a little, prepare for the landing, hope I can nail it this time level out. Help myself out with some sleeping pills soften the blow. There are a few things I don't love and that's one. A human body needs sleep and that's just not fucking normal... but I'm not normal... and who knows what the fuck that is anyways. This is me, completely totally crazy, mood swings, a little messy. I'll just keep riding knowing the waves go up and down and the crashes come but I've always made my way back up. I've always been a good swimmer, even if I'm stuck treading water for awhile.

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euphoricallyunaware · 6 years

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Just for shits and gigsss

The meaning behind my url: Not actually too sure hahaha

A picture of me: :))))

How many tattoos i have and what they are: Don't have any yet, but soon!

Last time i cried and why: Few days ago I think, bc I'm a sook

Piercings i have: Just my tongue now

Favorite band: I dunno really haha

Biggest turn offs: A lack of respect

Top 5 (pet hates): lying, chewing with mouth open, being called “cutie”, people not cleaning up after themselves, tailgaters

Tattoos i want: I want a sleeve for my right arm and a particular quote on my collar bone and hopefully another one on my wrist

Biggest turn ons: loving and caring about me HAHAHAH

Age: 18

Ideas of a perfect date: Somewhere away from heaps of people, picnic?? beach?? I dunno

Life goal: To be genuinely happy and have everything fall into place

Piercings i want: I think I want my nose done again, & nipples

Relationship status: Single

Favorite movie: Prozac Nation

A fact about my life: Its a rollercoaster for sure

Phobia: Spiders and Clowns

Middle name: ew no

Height: I literally have no idea, but I'm like average

Are you a virgin? yes

What’s your shoe size? 7-8

What’s your sexual orientation? lil gay ya knowww

Do you smoke, drink, or take any drugs? Smoke yes, Drink rarely, Drugs not anymore

Someone you miss: my bestie

What’s one thing you regret? I regret many things

First celebrity you think of when someone says attractive: ??

Favorite ice cream? Not a fan, id go like mango or watermelon gelato though

One insecurity: My head hahaha

What my last text message says: “Thank you, little expensive”

Have you ever taken a picture naked? Yep

Have you ever painted your room? No

Have you ever kissed a member of the same sex? Yes

Have you ever slept naked? Yes

Have you ever danced in front of your mirror? Yes

Have you ever had a crush? Yes

Have you ever been dumped? No

Have you ever stole money from a friend? No

Have you ever gotten in a car with people you just met? Yes

Have you ever been in a fist fight? Yes

Have you ever snuck out of your house? Yes

Have you ever had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back? Yes

Have you ever been arrested? Yes

Have you ever made out with a stranger? Yes

Have you ever met up with a member of the opposite sex somewhere? Yes

Have you ever left your house without telling your parents? Yes

Have you ever had a crush on your neighbour? No

Have you ever ditched school to do something more fun? Yes

Have you ever slept in a bed with a member of the same sex? Yes

Have you ever seen someone die? No

Have you ever been on a plane? Yes

Have you ever kissed a picture? No

Have you ever slept in until 3? Easily

Have you ever love someone or miss someone right now? Yes

Have you ever laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by? Yes

Have you ever made a snow angel? No

Have you ever played dress up? Yes

Have you ever cheated while playing a game? Yes

Have you ever been lonely? Yes

Have you ever fallen asleep at work/school? work no, school yes

Have you ever been to a club? Sorta

Have you ever felt an earthquake? Yes - well the aftershocks of one

Have you ever touched a snake? Yes

Have you ever ran a red light? Yes, accidentally

Have you ever been suspended from school? Yes - many times

Have you ever had detention? Yes

Have you ever been in a car accident? Yes

Have you ever hated the way you look? Yes

Have you ever witnessed a crime? Yes

Have you ever pole danced? hahahahaha I may have attempted

Have you ever been lost? Yes

Have you ever been to the opposite side of the country? No

Have you ever felt like dying? Yes

Have you ever cried yourself to sleep? Yes

Have you ever sang karaoke? Yes

Have you ever done something you told yourself you wouldn’t? Oh yes

Have you ever laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? I think so

Have you ever slept with someone at least 5 years older or younger? No

Have you ever kissed in the rain? No

Have you ever sang in the shower? Yes

Have you ever made out in a park? No

Have you ever dream that you married someone? No

Have you ever glued your hand to something? Yes

Have you ever got your tongue stuck to a flag pole? No

Have you ever ever gone to school partially naked? No

Have you ever been a cheerleader? No

Have you ever sat on a roof top? Yes

Have you ever brush your teeth? Yes

Have you ever been too scared to watch scary movies alone? Yes

Have you ever played chicken? Yes

Have you ever been pushed into a pool with all your clothes on? Yes

Have you ever been told you’re hot by a complete stranger? Yes

Have you ever broken a bone? Yes

Have you ever been easily amused? Yes

Have you ever laughed so hard you cried? Yes

Have you ever mooned/flashed someone? Yes

Have you ever cheated on a test? Yes

Have you ever forgotten someone’s name? Yes

Have you ever met someone who didn’t seem real? ???

Give us one thing about you that no one knows? Yeah nah

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myonlinegaminguniverse · 4 years

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One Consumer's Observations of the Mental Health Care System in America

The mental health framework is a one of a kind culture. Psychiatry itself is, not normal for some other clinical claim to fame. Mental health is an encased framework. That implies it is a world inside a world. The specialists, advisors, patients, and backing laborers assume jobs. It's a corresponding climate. Every major part in the framework permits the other individual the chance to showcase their job. For instance, the specialist gives you an analysis that has no premise (Yes this occurs every now and then). You, the patient, having total confidence in the forces of the conduct health framework, acknowledge this determination as the absolute truth. In time, you start to see certain practices and musings that you accept might be an indication of your alleged disease. You re-visitation of your primary care physician and report these indications. Your therapist concurs with your perceptions and sets up them in your clinical account. He additionally embeds his definitive remarks to help his conclusion. Thusly, the two players in the relationship are commonly approved in their jobs.

At the point when one has been assuming the patient part for such a long time, an individual starts to distinguish oneself as a "psych tolerant." That's what your identity is. This is the term that characterizes your very presence. You have a place with the mental health framework. Before long enough you locate that each movement you connect with yourself in is identified with your problem and the prescription your primary care physician endorsed to stifle it. It's a miserable analysis for sure. It's more troubled still for the individual who unnecessarily battles against an undefinable imperfection in their character as though the determination were the unquestionable truth. I recognize the way that the agitating situation I am painting here isn't valid for each mental patient.

Eventually, the Protecc Mental Health finds the advantages of being named mentally sick. There are mental health laborers, for example, caseworkers who help the "customer" in getting a free living remittance from the Federal government as Social Security Disability Income or Supplemental Security Income in whatever negligible sum it might be. I will include for comfort that federal retirement aide incapacity benefits are accounted for (by the legislature) to run dry in 2016. A customer is regularly qualified with the expectation of complimentary lodging, health care, food help, and substantially more. The mentally sick individual may even have the privilege under certain handicap laws to bring a pit-bull into a no-pet private network. Actually, you could even take it on a business aircraft. The explanation is essentially in light of the fact that your specialist esteemed it vital that you have an enthusiastic help creature (oh no was that a mystery?). Try not to misunderstand me. I'm certain there are individuals who require a partner creature for their passionate health. I'm doing whatever it takes not to be impolite to the individuals who are battling. What I'm stating that there are motivating forces incorporated with the framework for some individuals to acknowledge their conclusion and assume out their job.

There are caseworkers and effort laborers that will go to court with you, and promoter for your benefit under the steady gaze of the appointed authority when you cross paths with the law. They will assist the mentally sick with the entirety of their own issues. What a deal! Run out and educate the entirety of your companions concerning it. Let the administration deal with you. It makes being a mental patient appear to be a lot more appealing. Is there any good reason why anyone wouldn't need a therapist name to them crippled? Once more, I'm being snide to come to my meaningful conclusion that individuals, who are inappropriately marked with a DSM V determination, risked getting reliant on the mental health framework for their requirements.

This sort of social government assistance urges individuals to surrender their desire and inspiration. It ingrains the possibility that living a negligible presence is adequate. I, for one, have faith in the enormity individuals can accomplish for themselves and the world by putting forth a concentrated effort.

Recollect this. When you get into the mental health framework your odds of getting out are thin. There are various purposes behind this. Fundamentally in light of the fact that the specialist or clinician has you persuaded that you have a genuine clinical issue, which you can't deal with yourself. We as a whole realize that is strange. Numerous individuals deal with their downturn and nervousness amazingly well without the utilization of mental prescriptions. In the event that Ativan quiets your nerves and causes you work, at that point that is incredible. Then again, I have seen a lot of individuals become dependent on narcotics. These medications are risky. I wouldn't place your confidence in the security of the antidepressants either. I think the drug monsters rush to call attention to that because of the various legal claims documented against them.

Some fault can be set on the drug organizations for this unnatural medication reliance. As I was composing this article, I rode NAMI's site (National Alliance for Mental Illness) and saw "In Our Own Voice," a government funded training program, is supported by an award from Eli Lily. This is the drug monster that produces mental medications like Prozac, Zyprexa, and Cymbalta. I accumulate (without a lot of mental exertion) that Eli Lily's liberality is an exposure mission to make them seem as though one of the heroes in the mental field, and subsequently, help deals. As I surfaced the Internet, I found that NAMI has been accepting something reasonable of analysis for their faulty relationship with drug organizations. I won't state NAMI is shameless or dishonest. That would be excessively simple. On the off chance that Ely Lily offered me a great many dollars, I would need to genuinely think about taking it. Once in a while the choice to go too far relies upon one's genuine needs. Different occasions it simply has to do with making a buck. There is no rejecting that this sort of corporate offense unfavorably influences the mental health framework and fuels the enduring of its shoppers. Once more, I realize a few people need the support of the drug organizations and the mental network. The screening cycle for endorsing these drugs is a major contributor to the issue. That is on the grounds that there is no sufficient cycle set up for administering these possibly perilous medications.

Society itself adds to this useless culture. The overall disposition of people in general is "the length of they are not disturbing us you can do what you please with them." This gives the mental health suppliers considerably greater power to do however they see fit. Thus the mental patient is deprived of their privileges. From my perspective, a mental patient is a person without regard or poise. You can call my words sensational in the event that you like.

It might appear as I am refusing to accept responsibility for the issues at hand and the taking on the casualty job. Permit to explain the function of the patient in the mental health framework (those such as myself). I will be the first to concede that the educated mental patient is the person who is principally liable for their shocking circumstance. We need to acknowledge our function in the framework. Nobody can force you despite your good faith, and state, "Go see a specialist about your uneasiness." At least that is valid by and large. At the point when you consider why you did it, you will say, "It appeared to be a smart thought at that point."

The most noticeably awful thing a mentally sick individual would actually do, is informing somebody concerning their condition. When you do, the other individual glances at you in an unexpected way. A programmed streak goes off in the individual's cerebrum, "Gracious God. Here we go. His ailment is misbehaving." This demeanor is particularly recognizable despite a mental health proficient, your relatives, and dearest companions. It's a general response. From the second you uncover your mystery, all that you do will be accused on your ailment. The manners by which you communicate as a typical individual will be estimated against your alleged issue. On the off chance that you are baffled about something, the individuals throughout your life will finish up, "His drugs aren't working." When individuals figure you can't hear them, they will chatter among themselves, "Goodness he's a psych tolerant. That is the reason he looks fomented. That is essential for his disease." This disposition is very normal. It originates from an absence of comprehension. How could an individual know, except if the person in question has by and by experienced it.

On the off chance that you should endeavor to express your privileges as a person, the mental health supplier will continue to have you focused on a mental emergency clinic without wanting to. The patient can be held for an uncertain timeframe until a clinician chooses the individual has woken up. The mental health experts can basically do anything they desire with you in light of the fact that nobody will take a stand in opposition to them. In Massachusetts, mental patients must hold an exceptionally prepared attorney to speak to them under the watchful eye of a mental health court so as to be delivered. This is the place we are in 2013. I'll wager the greater part of you perusing this article didn't have a clue how our conduct health framework functions. We are still in obscurity ages.

The main time the condition of the mental health framework is uncovered is the point at which a patient ends it all or kills somebody. At that point there is a public commotion and the specialist or advisor are accused or now and again sued. With all due respect, no specialist can control the conduct of their patient in the public arena. That isn't their activity from my perspective. The mental health proficient can't be considered liable for the activities of their patients, except if they were terribly careless somehow or another. We are free and sovereign people. In the United States, individuals are by and large permitted to work uninhibitedly without unnecessary impedance from others. The American disposition is "Nobody has the privilege to instruct me." It's a marginally unique story if the patient expresses that the person plans to end it all or murder somebody. At that point the call to obligation is enacted.

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curtiskyle · 4 years

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meltingalphabet · 7 years

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thanks to hypnotherapy, I no longer dream about my father

I started seeing Dr. Helen Williams 6 months ago. My childhood was… rough. I was diagnosed with PTSD and OCD a little over 4 years ago now, and my psychologist, Dr. Rebecca Santos, thought hypnotic regression therapy could help in ways that drugs and traditional therapy could not.

I had tried talk therapy, group therapy, support groups, experimental drugs, and nothing seemed to help. Prozac dulled the pain and allowed me to get up in the morning, but, as Rebecca explained, I had difficulty facing my childhood trauma and healing the wounds created by my father.

So, a few months ago, Rebecca referred me to Helen, a prominent and highly respected hypnotherapist in New York City. Rebecca spoke with Helen about my case, and she agreed to lower her exorbitant fee substantially so that I could afford to see her once a month. Even then, one appointment with her still cost more than four appointments with Rebecca. I was a pro bono case without being worth actual pro bono work. But Rebecca seemed to think it was one of the only options left with some hope to heal me. So I went.

I was desperate to get rid of the nightmares. Prazosin, my med that was supposed to magically quiet my PTSD night terrors, helped, but I was still haunted by my father’s dark stoic face at least two times a week in my traitorous dreams. I’d wake up, sobbing, drenched with sweat, tears, and more often than I’d like to admit, my own urine.

I couldn’t date or have a boyfriend, I couldn’t even have one night stands. Other than Rebecca, I was completely alone. I was unable to trust people enough to have friends, the only ones remotely close to me were a few co-workers who talked at me while I remained silent as I made my morning coffee, or while I was doing my lunch dishes in the communal sink.

I tried to live with a roommate once, since I don’t make a lot of money and it seemed like a fiscally responsible idea, but that only lasted a few months before neither of us could take the tension anymore. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but even before the first week was done, I was mentally kicking myself for such a dumb plan. Of course no one could live with me.

I thought about adopting a cat once. Even Rebecca thought it could be a good idea: me taking care of another living creature. I went down to the pet store after my appointment, and held an adorable tiny black kitten in my hands for a few seconds before thoughts of it’s ultimate demise crept into my head. I began to tremble, tears welling in my eyes, my breathing shortening into painful gasps. I thrust the kitten into the arms of the employee, who asked me if I was alright. I shook my head and ran out, his gaze reminding me of the inescapable fact that I am broken.

Helen’s office was in a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn, right next to Prospect Park. The area is really fancy. As I walked briskly from the subway stop, the cool January sun shone down on large brick buildings, expensive wine shops, and shiny playgrounds. I passed small cleancut families walking home from work and school. The children ran past their parents, their snow boots free from dirt and mud, their winter jackets much nicer than my own.

I rung the buzzer and a woman’s voice crackled through the small metal box.

“Hello?” She sounded surprised. Did I get the wrong day? Was I early? I’m often too early.

I hesitantly responded, “It’s Lisa.”

A loud mechanical buzzer sounded from inside the door, and I entered. Her office was immaculate. It reminded me of other doctor’s offices, but with less forced ambiance. Instead of an awkward print of a still life or horses hung crookedly on a stark wall stained with fingerprints, Helen had rich beautiful paintings of Greek figures and statues of animals made of wood or stone. Instead of a small dirty fish tank, Helen had a low mahogany table with large coffee table books from museums, filled with images of art and architecture, all in pristine condition.

Helen greeted me with a warm smile and a firm handshake, “you must be Lisa. Hi, I’m Dr. Williams, but you can call me Helen.”

“It’s very nice to meet you.” I responded, returning her smile. Our hands fell apart, and I stepped back to take a seat on the smooth leather couch. She sat opposite me in a tall backed chair, and placed her cell phone face down on an end table beside her. She crossed her legs, sat back, and smiled at me.

“Why don’t we start with you telling me a little bit about yourself?”

I explained my symptoms, and then began to describe the abuse I experienced at the hands of my father. She nodded as she listened, her smile turning into a look of concern and sympathy. I could hear my throat tighten over my words as I mentioned the twisted mental games my father would play. Helen grabbed a box of tissue strategically positioned at her side, and handed them to me. By the end, even though I never went into great detail about what the games entailed, I was sobbing, a small pile of used tissues in my lap.

Helen stared at me for a moment, studying my face while I silently looked from my hands to the bookcase behind her. Finally, she spoke. “I think Dr. Santos was correct in referring you to me. It sounds like you have difficulties facing the pain your father put you through. A very understandable response to that type of abuse, especially at such a young age. This type of trauma is almost impossible for most to face alone.” She paused. “If you’re still comfortable with the idea, I think hypnotic regression therapy could help. I’ll be with you the entire time, so you won’t have to face him alone. I’ll put you under, and then direct you through the memory that surfaces. Together, we’ll attempt to resolve the trauma, walk away from the memory, and put it, as literally as possible, behind you. From there, hopefully we can move forward into a lighter, healthier future away from the memories of your father.” She smiled kindly at me.

I tried to muster a response, but all I could manage was a feeble smile and nod.

“Great, let’s begin then. Go ahead and lay down. Make sure you’re comfortable. At least as much as possible. I understand that it’ll be difficult since this will be your first experience with the procedure.”

I followed her instructions and laid back on the leather couch. The seat was wide, so it wasn’t too difficult to get into a somewhat comfortable position. I grabbed a pillow and placed it under my head.

“Good,” Helen’s maternal voice cooed, “now close your eyes.”

I did, shutting out the office around me.

“Focus on your breath. Concentrate on breathing in, and out. Slowly pull the air deep into your lungs, but without forcing it. Draw it in, let it fill your chest. Now hold it, just for a moment, before releasing it and letting it spill from your mouth. Good. Realize how comforting it feels, to breath.”

I focused on the sensation of breathing, of air entering and exiting my body, allowing the rhythm to lull me into a secure comfort.

“Follow the air as it travels through you. Watch it’s path with your mind’s eye, in and out. Good. Very Good, Lisa. Now focus on the room around you. No, don’t open your eyes, look without sight. Reach out without touch. Extend yourself physically without moving. Take up space while keeping your body as it is. What does the room sound like? How does the air feel like against your skin? Can you sense my presence across from you? How about the couch underneath you? What is it like, not visually, but what does its existence beneath you mean to your body?”

She grew silent, and I listened. I listened to the hiss of an old radiator, felt the silence hovering between me and Helen. My skin and muscles sank into the couch, and my body seemed large, much larger than it should. I could hear that Helen was speaking to me again, but the words were indistinguishable.

I became engulfed by the couch, the leather suffocating me, and I felt trapped. I tried to move my arms and legs, to escape from the unbreathable fabric, but they were unresponsive. My heart began to pound in my chest, and my mouth opened and closed like a fish's, searching desperately for air, when suddenly, I could hear Helen again, much louder than before, as if she were speaking right into my ear.

“Remember your father.” She said.

I gasped as air came back to me. I looked around, dazed. I was in my childhood home. In the kitchen. A bowl of soggy marshmallow cereal in front of me, and my small green backpack next to it on the counter. I looked in amazement at the detail of the bag, the pink beaded charm I had made hanging from one of the zippers in the front. Footsteps from behind startled me, and I whipped my head around to see him enter the room: my father.

I hadn’t seen the man for seventeen years, not since I ran away in high school. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but he seemed to be a giant standing behind my young frame. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. His beady brown eyes boring into me as he examined my face with a look of feigned interest. His dark hair was trimmed short, and he was freshly shaved.

“Morning, starfish.” He said, looking at me without any affection. I said nothing in response. I just stared at him. He stood, unmoving for a few seconds, then slowly his gaze shifted towards my backpack. He reached out for it, but I grabbed the bag before he could get it and hugged it to my body. He chuckled softly, “Oh, you don’t need that today, starfish.” His large hand engulfed half of the small bag within my grasp, and he tugged lightly, “you’re not going to school today.”

I looked up at him, my voice strained with the effort of keeping my tears at bay and my bag to my stomach, “what do you mean? I want to go to school.” I softly added, “I like going to school.”

He chuckled. A chuckle that was much too deep, so it sounded fake. Like a laugh a bad actor in a soap opera would make. “But today’s your birthday! You don’t need to go to school on your birthday! Daddy’s going to take you to the zoo!” His voice rang out like a clown’s, overly happy, sickly sweet with disingenuous excitement.

I was no longer able to keep the tears from freely flowing down my cheek, “but Daddy, today’s not my birthday.”

His face grew stern. He looked mean. It was a look I knew very well. He leaned close to my face, so close that I could no longer focus on him, but had to shift my vision from one of his eyes to the other to hold his stare.

“Shut up.” He said without inflection. “Today’s you’re goddamn birthday and we’re going to the fucking zoo, got it?”

I nodded as a small whimper escaped my mouth. He pulled, hard, and my backpack came out of my hands so forcefully I could hear the fabric rip. I cried as my father walked to the kitchen trashcan, and dropped my bag into it.

“Get in the car.” He growled.

The mustang was hot. The leather seat was sticking to the bottom of my thighs. I started to roll down the passenger window, but a low growl from the driver seat stopped me. I put my hand back in my lap and sat there, as still as physically possible, not wanting to make today any worse than it was already going to be. We sat in the car in stifling silence.

I thought about the cake he bought, sitting in the back seat behind me. I imagined the fluffy white frosting melting in the sun. Large droplets of sweat rolled down my back and I grimaced. My bottom jaw shook with the effort of not crying, but at this point, I knew for certain that we were not going to the zoo. I hadn’t ever believed we were, but as our home and the safety of school became further and further away, the bigger the pit in my stomach became. I could feel the little cereal I had eaten earlier in the day rise in my throat, but I swallowed the sensation away.

My father drove and drove, for what felt like hours. The landscape gradually shifted from inner city to woods as I stared, dead eyed, out the window. We turned onto an empty dirt road surrounded by thick trees, which blocked the high noon sun. It was slightly cooler here than it was before, but my t-shirt was soaked with sweat. I tried to wipe my brow, but my arm was so wet that it accomplished nothing. We stopped in front of an old abandoned shack, the weight of age and neglect making the building look stooped, as if it was trying to join the ground beneath it. My father turned off the car.

I swallowed. I hadn’t been here before, which meant I didn’t know what to expect. That was more terrifying than anything else. My father got out of the car, but I stayed seated. I learned a long time ago that it was best to wait and follow instructions.

I watched him walk around the back of the car to the door behind me, and open it. He reached in and grabbed the cake, closing the door behind him. He opened my door, and waited, like a driver. I reluctantly got out. He lead me to the shack, and I followed.

I examined the small structure. The wood was rotted and filled with insects. Inside was worse. Funguses of different colors and shapes spattered the walls. It shook and groaned in the slight summer breeze. My father pointed to a corner, “sit.”

I obeyed. He put the cake in front of me, and knelt down, so that we were eye to eye. He lifted a hand to my cheek and wiped away a tear gently.

“Now, starfish. You know how important your birthday is to me, don’t you?”

I nodded slowly as he removed the plastic cover from the store bought cake. I looked at the purple font, “Happy Birthday, Lisa” written neatly by a baker. She had adorned the words with tiny white flowers and three balloons, red, yellow, and blue, were painted to the side. I imagined her smiling as she wrote it, looking up at my father watching her from behind the glass counter. Her heart melting as she saw a loving father, excitedly waiting for his little girl’s birthday cake to be finished, so he could surprise her with it.

I wanted to vomit. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to die.

“Good. I’m so sorry to do this to you on your special day, but daddy has to run a few errands, so you’re going to have to stay here for a little bit.” My eyes widened with disbelief. He was going to leave me here, in this old decrepit shack in the middle of nowhere. I began to shake my head, as my sobs morphed into pained screams. I could hear the desperation and fear, the pleading in my small voice. My father hushed me, and kissed me on the lips, holding his mouth against mine for much too long. My cries escaped from the sides of his mouth, and he grabbed my hair, pulling my head back, hard. I screamed out in pain.

“Daddy is sorry, Lisa, but there is nothing Daddy can do about this, ok? Stop being such a fucking brat.” My eyes were closed tight with fear, but I felt something fill my mouth with the last syllable. I looked to see my father stuffing handfuls of birthday cake into my mouth. I could feel the sticky sweet substance force its way into my throat and I tried to gag, but he kept shoving more and more cake inside my small mouth.

Finally, I vomited. Cake hit the dirt floor in front of my father’s feet with a dull thud, mixed with yellow bile and half digested marshmallows. He lept back in disgust, wiped his frosting covered hand on his jeans, and walked out without another word. I threw up again. Wiping my mouth on my t-shirt, I looked up just in time to see my father get into the car, and slam the door closed. I stood, instinct yelling at my body to run to the car, to get in before he could get away, but the combination of my child body and my recent vomiting made me slow and clumsy. I pushed myself forward, but my feet tripped over rocks and sticks. I reached the door and used the doorway to thrust myself into the road, just in time to see the car roll out of view.

I stood there, my sobs choking my still burning throat.

“Lisa, it’s ok, I’m here.” Helen’s soothing voice reached out to me. I looked around the woods, desperately searching for her. “Lisa, come back to me. It’s ok, I’m still with you. I’ve been here the whole time” The world shifted, and I felt sick again. I closed my eyes, allowing my stomach to settle. The sensation of someone stroking my hair back was comforting, and I opened my eyes to see Helen kneeling above me. She looked concerned. “Are you ok, Lisa?”

I took a deep breath in, and exhaled. I was sweating profusely, and my face and shirt were wet with sweat and tears. But I was surprised to find the awful feelings of the memory were quickly subsiding. Maybe it was that I was no longer alone, that Helen was here with me. Maybe it was the distance age and years allowed. But I felt… calm. I nodded.

Helen made me a cup of tea, and I stayed for another hour, talking about the memory. I left that day feeling lighter than I had in my entire life. I went back to Helen five more times. Each time, I left a little lighter. Helen explained that, unlike talking about the memories, reliving them with her direction can help bury it. Like a funeral, a final goodbye to the past, one horrible memory at a time. The nightmares still came, but I felt like I could control them, at least a little. I could yell back at my father, I could leave, I could try to fight. It wasn’t as if I was suddenly cured, but I had control over myself and my life that I didn’t before. And even that little bit of control was world changing for me.

I went in this month, same as normal. I clicked the buzzer, waiting for Helen’s usual “Hello?” but instead was greeted by the mechanical buzz of the door unlocking. I figured she assumed it was me, and walked in.

I entered her office, and saw her sitting in her usual high backed chair. I was surprised at first, since she normally greeted me at the door, but then I noticed her hands were bound behind her back, and her mouth was gagged. I started towards her when a sharp pain pinched my upper arm, and the world went suddenly dark.

I blinked my eyes open. The room was a blinding white at first, but it grew into focus with each blink. I was still in Helen’s office. I was on the couch, and she was in front of me, her eyes wide. I tried to rub my arm, sore from earlier, but my hands were bound behind me. My attempt to cry out was blocked by a piece of cloth in my mouth.

It was then that I noticed Helen and I were not alone. There was a tall slender man standing between us, but off to the side. I looked at him in shock and bewilderment, and he smiled at me. He was wearing a fitted black suit and a muted green tie. His blonde hair was combed back, and his face was rectangular with high cheekbones. In any other situation, I’m sure I would have found him handsome. He bowed towards me, stiffly.

“Why, hello, my dear.” He said, straightening. His voice was sticky sweet like honey and made my stomach recoil. “My name is Alexander.” He walked towards Helen, who watched him with almost unnaturally wide eyes. She looked so frightened, and I felt my body cringe, my muscles trying to twist in every direction simultaneously beneath my skin. My breathing became short and I felt my throat close. The gag was suffocating me. Alexander raised his eyebrow at me as he leaned his elbow on the back of Helen’s chair.

“Now now, dear. No need for a panic attack. I’m not here for you.” He elongated the last word. He looked down at Helen, and smiled lovingly before looking back at me, “trust me, you are perfectly safe. You will leave here tonight, completely unharmed.”

I breathed deeply through my nose, and forced air out through the cloth in my mouth. My body calmed slightly, but not because of Alexander’s promise. I did it because I needed to keep my head. I couldn’t lose myself, like I used to as a child to my father. I needed to treat this as a nightmare, and not lose control.

Alexander continued, “see, I didn’t know anyone else would be here tonight. Helen used to never take patients on Fridays. But I guess you’re… special.” He said, his eyes shining menacingly. I focused on my breath. “See, I used to be Dr. Williams’ apprentice last year, but the bitch got rid of me.” He snarled at her, and she shook in her seat. I watched her reaction with utter disgust. He looked at me, “Helen here, thought I wasn’t cut out for psychiatric work. She explained that I wasn’t… what was the word you used? Oh right, sympathetic.” His face twisted with rage. “But, I assure you, dear,” he said to me, “that I can be quite sympathetic. That’s exactly why you have no reason to be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you.” Again, the word “you” came out of his mouth too long, taking too much time to leave his lips. I shuddered.

Alexander turned his back to me, and faced Helen. He produced another strip of black cloth from his pocket, and tied it around her face, covering those wide fear struck eyes of hers. She began to squirm within her bounds, whimpering. He rubbed her arms and shushed her.

“Shhhh, Helen. Shhhh. Focus on your breath. Let yourself get lost in the gentle rhythm of breathing in, and out.” Helen shook her head, and squirmed harder. Alexander groaned and reached into his chest pocket, “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.” I could see a syringe in his hand, filled with a thick clear liquid. He punched it into her upper arm, and she cried out, the sound muffled. He pushed the plunger down, the clear liquid disappearing inside her. Her body almost immediately relaxed. Alexander removed the syringe, and gently rubbed where he had punctured her, “Shhhh, Helen. There there. That’s much better, isn’t it.” The last sentence was not a question.

“Now focus on your breath, Helen. Concentrate your entire mind on it. Slowly breath in,” he breathed in loudly, “and out.” He exaggerated expelling the air out of his mouth.

Alexander began to pace between us as he continued putting Helen into a trance, “feel the weight of your body as it sinks into the chair beneath you. Feel your muscles melt and become one with your environment. You and the room you exist in are no longer separate, but exist simultaneously together, as one.” I watched Helen’s chest rise and fall with each heavy breath.

He removed the blindfold and gag. Helen stared blankly in front of her, completely entranced. Alexander bent down behind her back, and undid her bonds, but she kept her hands behind her, even after he stepped away. “Very, very good. You can put your hands on your lap now, Helen.” She obeyed him, emotionless. “Good, very good.”

He turned and smiled at me. “What would you like to see her do?” I shook my head, but he ignored the gesture and continued. “Would you like to see her cluck like a chicken?” I kept shaking my head. “Would you like to watch her touch herself?” I shook my head harder, tears falling. “No, oh, that’s such a shame.” He put his chin in his hand in a false gesture of consideration, “I’m sure we could find something we’d both enjoy watching.” I could feel the snot begin to flow down my upper lip, and land on my gag as I sobbed.

“Aha, I know! Something short and sweet. That way, I can have what I want and you can get out of here in time for supper.” He winked, and my skin crawled. I tried to scream at him. He turned back to Helen.

“Would you like to see her play the violin?” He asked over his shoulder, not turning away from her. He straightened and cleared his voice dramatically, “Helen,” he said, “you remember how to play, don’t you? I know you haven’t touched a violin in years, but… Let’s give it a try. First position!” He ordered. Helen lifted her arms out elegantly in front of her, her left arm straight, her hand cupped as if holding a physical instrument. Her right arm was above where the body of the violin would be, poised and ready.

Alexander looked back at me and smiled a broad wicked smile. He walked to a small black briefcase in the corner, and pulled something out. He turned back towards Helen, and I screamed. In his hand was a long, sharp kitchen knife. He placed the handle of the knife in Helen’s right hand, the hand that would be holding a bow in Helen’s mind’s eye.

He walked to the couch where I sat, paralyzed with terrifying realization, and sat down next to me, so close I could feel his thigh against mine. I tried to move away, but he put his arm around my shoulders as if we were a couple about to watch a movie. Helen sat there in front of us, frozen, the knife hovering above her pale inner arm. I screamed, but all that emanated from my mouth was a dull noise.

“Ok Helen,” Alexander said, grinning, “play Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2.” He lowered his mouth to me, “that’s my favorite,” he whispered, his hot breath against my ear.

I wanted to close my eyes, to block out the sight I knew was coming, but I couldn’t. I watched, bile tickling my throat as Helen brought the knife down to the fleshy part of her left arm, and began to play.

I looked on with horror as she drew her bow swiftly across her skin, red droplets forming where the silver blade touched her. She pushed the knife back across, briskly, completing the note, and started again. Her bow arm moved with smooth grace, quick but steady, back and forth. Blood began to fall more freely from her wounds as she moved her left fingers against invisible strings, playing notes only she could hear. Her body rocked forward and back with each movement of her arm, feeling music instead of pain. The tempo quickened, the knife skitting across flesh lightly with the more delicate notes, building and building, scratching shallow marks into her. She paused, the knife hovering back in first position as mute instruments joined her concerto, blossoming soundlessly as the room grew heavy with silence and the stench of fresh blood. Her eyes were focused in front of her in intense concentration as she listened, but all I could hear was the dripping of blood onto the wooden floor and my heart pounding in my ears.

She slowly brought the knife back down, and dragged it, shaking her left hand to create a dark and haunting vibrato. Her whole body moved with the slower, drawn out notes, the knife sinking deep into flesh, blood gushing from her arm, and falling in small waterfalls onto her lap. She closed her eyes, allowing the music to flow through her body, feeling the chords, the wood of the instrument in her arms, the flow of the bow across waxy strings. Her arm was raw with deep red cuts, but still she played. Her dress wet with crimson, the blood pooling and dripping off her lap, flowing down her bare legs, and joining as one growing puddle on the floor beneath her.

The stench of iron filled my nostrils, the room muggy with the heavy air, filled with bits and pieces of Helen. She cut the knife deep, her bow arm moving with blinding speed as she built, heavy handedly, to the concerto’s crescendo. At this point, she had cut the tendons hidden within her muscles and bone, for her left fingers no longer played along, but hung useless outward, dead to the music. The knife weaved and danced, cutting deep into the muscle beneath. A chunk of flesh was cut loose from her arm, and fell in front of her with a dull thud. I could see the white of bones from within the tangle of red mess. Helen straightened, drawing her bow back one last time before finally falling forward so that her torso was bent onto her thighs in a perverse bow to her audience. Her bow hand reached out towards us from between her chest and her wet, bloodsoaked lap, completely undamaged. The knife fell from her dead fingers, landing in front of my feet. Her violin arm dangled down by her side, her hand resting on the floor in a pool of blood. The reminder of her concerto permanently etched deep into her arm, and my memory.

Alexander clapped loudly beside me. “Bravo, bravo!” He yelled, standing to continue his macabre applause. Finally, he stopped, turning to me. He patted me on the shoulder, “good show, no?” He paused, but all I could do was cry and shake. “Well, I guess Bartoks not for everyone. Sorry I can’t stay any longer, but I should probably head out. Don’t want to stay out too late!” He grabbed his briefcase from the corner, and walked to the door. He took a long black umbrella from the hook beside the door frame, turned to me one last time, and bowed low before leaving into the night.

I sat there, numb, looking at my dead therapist. The police arrived forty minutes later. They said they had received an anonymous call about screams coming from this apartment. Since no one would have been able to hear us over our gags, I assume Alexander called so they’d come rescue me. Though, I am far from being rescuable at this point.

The police are still looking for him, and in the meantime I have police protection around the clock. The problem is, I’ve been thinking a lot about that night, and I can’t rule out the possibility that he may have hypnotized me too. I remember the pinch in my upper arm when I arrived, the blackness before I awoke. He could have programmed me to do anything. There’s no way to know if he did, and if I’m right, I have no idea what will trigger it. Or what he told me to do once triggered. I’m even more frightened to leave my apartment now than I was before. I’ve gotten rid of anything here that I could possibly use to kill myself or others, as well as anything that could trigger me, like my television. All I have left is this computer, which I will probably never use again after posting this.

My PTSD nightmares have come back in full force, but thanks to hypnotherapy, I no longer dream about my father.

#nosleep #creepypasta #horror #shortstory #triggerwarning

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understandingchaoss · 7 years

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Hey! I was wondering what the names were of the medications that you take. Im having a hard time trying to find the right type of medications to help me and i know youve tried some, Thanks!

Hi anon. First of all, what works for one person, may not work for the other. Mental health medications are a serious matter and everyone’s brain reacts to them different. So in reality, the names of the medications that I take shouldn’t really be important, because there is a wide variety of medications. I’ve tried 11 different ones so far and haven’t even made a dent in all of the medications that are available. I currently take Wellbutrin, Latuda, and Mirtazapine. I am prescribed Lorazepam when needed for anxiety.

I’m not sure if you know, but there are what they call different “families” of medications for mental illness. My suggestion, if you haven’t already, would be to try out different ones in different families, whether it be together or just one at a time. Most medications are designed to be taken together even if they aren’t of the same family.

Just so that you don’t have to sit down and google it all, I’ll include stuff for you to reference from if you feel like it’s something you need to bring up with your mental health professional. Each medication I’m going to list will have the name brands in parenthesis, if it’s applicable, and there are always different variations and types of almost every single medication. Also, please remember that each medication is designed to treat something different. A lot of the time, you can treat an illness that it may not be specifically designed for. My psychiatrist always reminds me that you are treating the symptoms of the illness, not the diagnosis. So just because something is designed to treat schizophrenia or bipolar doesn’t mean you can’t use it to treat depression or anxiety.

I will include which medications I have previously tried and whether or not I liked them, just to kind of give you an idea of how they might work in some people. But please do not base your judgement or decision off of that. This needs to be discussed with your mental health professional. The medications I’m going to list are also not every single medication available. There at least 20 in almost every single class or family, and some of them are almost irrelevant to list. But I’m hoping that what I do list will help you out.

Anitdepressants are a very broad family of medication, so sometimes I get a lot of my information mixed up, based on what I know. So anyone can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on some of the classifications or families of these medications. Each classification has a family.

There are anywhere from 4 to 9 different types of classifications depending on the way you look at it and if you classify the ones not widely used in the United States to even be a classification. Two of which are very similar, as are their medications, so I will be listing it as one. The first, most common, are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) which treat the lack of serotonin and include: Citalopram (Celexa), Escitalopram (Lexapro), Fluoxetine (Prozac, Rapiflux, Sarafem, Selfemra), Paroxetine (Paxil, Pexeva, Brisdelle), Sertraline (Zoloft). Out of those, I have tried Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft. I felt absolutely nothing on the Lexapro and the Paxil, so they didn’t help at all. I have awful results on Zoloft. I actually had cut myself for the first time while I was taking it. It also made my bad thoughts much more persistent. However, Zoloft is the most common medication used out of all of those.

Serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) wich treat the lack of serotonin and norepinephrine and include:Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq, Desfax, Ellefore, Khedezla), Duloxetine (Effexor, Irenka), Milnacipran (Ixel, Jonicia, Savella), Levomilnacipran (Fetzima).I have not tried any of these.

Tricyclic/tetracyclic antidepressants (TSAs) are amongst the most recent developed antidepressants. They tend to have a lot more side effects, so they are not very common. They include: Amitriptyline, Amoxapine, Desipramine (Norpramin), Doxepin, Imipramine (Tofranil), Nortriptyline (Pamelor), Protriptyline (Vivactil), Trimipramine (Surmontil), Mirtazapine (Remron). I currently take Mirtazapine and so far I like it. It's sedating, so it helps me sleep and it seems to be working well with my wellbutrin.

Reversible inhibitor of monoamine oxidase A (RIMAs) are an interesting type of antidepressant. It’s a lot more for me to type out, so if you’re interested in how they work, I’d be happy to answer that in a separate question. These are not widely used in the United States though. They consist of: Brofaromine (Consonar), Caroxazone (Surodil, Timostenil), Eprobemide (Befol), Metralindole (Inkazan), Minaprine (Cantor), Moclobemide (Aurorix, Manerix), Pirlindole (Priazidol), Toloxatone (Humoryl). I have not tried any of these.

Monoamine oxidase inhibitors treat norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. They consist of:Rasagiline (Azilect), Selegiline (Eldepryl, Zelapar), Isocarboxazid (Marplan), Phenelzine (Nardil), Tranylcypromine (Parnate). I have not tried any of these.

Serotonin antagonist and reuptake inhibitor (SARIs) act by antagonizing your serotonin receptions and inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin, norepinephrine, and sometimes dopamine. They include:Etoperidone (Axiomin, Etonin), Lorpiprazole (Normarex), Lubazodone, Mepiprazole (Psigodal), Nefazodone (Serzone, Nefadar), Trazodone (Desyrel). I have only tried Trazadone out of all of these. I didn’t really like it. It was prescribed for several things, one being sleep. And I felt like no matter how much I slept, I still felt sedated after waking up. I also showed no improvement mentally or emotionally, so my psychiatrist took me off of it.

Norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs) target both norepinephrine and dopamine both by blocking the transporters for both, and instead increasing the chemicals in the brain for both. They consist of: Amineptine (Survector, Maneon, Directim), Bupropion, (Wellbutrin), Dexmethylphenidate (Focalin), Difemetorext (Cleofil), Ethylphenditate, Lefetamine (Santenol), Methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, Meeadate, Methylin, Rubifen, Stimdate). I am currently on Wellbutrin, and have been since I was about 15 or 16. I really like it. I feel my energy boost throughout the day, especially since adding the Latuda. I feel like it keeps me pretty level. I do wish I could go up, from that level, if that makes sense. But other than that, I like the way it works.

The 3 most common families of antianxiety medications are:Clonazepam (Klonopin), Alprazolam (Niravam, Xanax), Lorazepam, (Ativan). I have only tried Lorazepam out of the 3, and so far I like it. I only take it when needed. It’s a tranquilizer, so low dosages are recommended. It makes me a little sleepy, depending on the level of my anxiety before I took it. I’ve taken it and haven’t felt tired at all on the days when my anxiety is the worst, so it just kind of depends.

The 4 common families of stimulants (these increase alertness, attention, energy, and elevate blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration) are:Methylphenidate (Aptensio, Concerta, Metadate, Methylin, Quillichew, Quillivant, Ritalin), Amphetamine (Eveko, Dyanavel, Adzenys. When combined with dextroamphetamine, the brand name is known as Adderall), Dextroamphetamine (Dexampex, Dexedrine, DextroStat, Ferndex, LiquADD, ProCentra), Lisdexamfetamine Dimesylate (Vyvanse). I have not tried any of these medications.

The antipsychotic family is broad. The older or “first generation” antipsychotic medications are also called conventional “typical” antipsychotics or “neuroleptics.” The four families of the first generation antipsychotics are:Chlorpromazine (Promapar, Thorazine), Haloperidol (Haldol), Perphenazine (Trilafon, Duo-Vil, Etrafon, Triavil), Fluphenazine (Permitil, Prolixin). I have not tried any of these.

The newer or “second generation” medications include:Risperidone (Risperdal), Olanzapine (Symbyax), Quetiapine (Seroquel), Ziprasidone (Geodon), Aripiprazole (Abilify), Paliperidone (Invega), Lurasidone (Latuda). I actually took Seroquel for about 5 years and had fantastic results. It’s a sedative, and a heavy one at that. We used it to treat several things, and one of them was sleep. The best time during my recovery was while I was on Seroquel (I was also on Wellbutrin at the same time and the combination worked so well). But just like any other mental health medication, it stopped working after a while. I have awful results on Abilify. It’s supposed to give you energy, like an “upper,” but for some reason I reacted the complete opposite and would fall asleep standing up, sitting down, and couldn’t physically hold my body up. I’ve only been taking Latuda for about 3 weeks and so far I really like it. It’s been working well with my Wellbutrin and Mirtazapine.

The 3 common families of mood stabilizers, which are used to treat bipolar, mood swings associated with other mental disorders, and in some cases, to augment the effect of other medications used to treat depression are:Carbamazepine (Carbatrol, Epitol, Equetro, Tegretol, Teril), Lamotrigine (Lamictal), Oxcarbazepine (Trileptal). I have not tried any of these.

Some mood stabilizers are sometimes classified as antipsychotic drugs, and some antipsychotic drugs are sometimes classified as mood stabilizers.

All of these probably only make up about half of the medications available. There are also medications that I have taken that I have not listed, just because they are not very common, nor is their classification or family. I have always been a firm believer in the fact that medications work for the right people. Do your research. I have never been able to stress that enough. Know what it is you’re taking and why you’re taking it. Look up its science and how the medication works inside of your body and brain. Talk with a mental health professional, if you don’t already have one. I do not recommend seeing only a medical doctor. If you would like more details on any of the things that I listed, feel free to ask and I can answer them as best as I can! Good luck!

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cameronsaunders95 · 4 years

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actutrends · 5 years

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Biden and Bernie duke it out on war and peace

Democratic governmental candidate Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.|Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Last Saturday in Iowa, the day after an American MQ-9 Reaper dropped its ordnance on Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Joe Biden moved quickly to make himself the face of Democratic opposition to Trump’s drone strike. It was early evening at a Des Moines elementary school gym, and in spite of the dip in temperature level and the long lines to enter, a larger and more engaged audience than the ones he attracted over the summertime and fall was awaiting the previous vice president.

It was a white-collar crowd– Des Moines-area attorneys and insurance market experts and a smattering of D.C. Obama veterans now in town to help Biden in the homestretch. The leading attorney at ICE under the last administration was there, and told me it was the very first time he had actually ever canvassed Iowa for a prospect.

Iran had actually heightened the stakes. “#WWIII” was trending online and predictions of a full-scale war were commonplace. Trump might now benefit from the halo that shines atop all wartime leaders, at least for a time. And the importance of the outcome of the Democratic primary– to state absolutely nothing of the country and the world– had all of a sudden ballooned. Would citizens want a skilled hand whose position on world affairs is essentially, “Believe me, I understand what I’m doing” (Biden) or would they gravitate towards someone like Bernie Sanders, whose ringing calls to get the U.S. out of Middle East quagmires have the advantage of clearness, however make numerous a D.C. foreign-policy hand queasy? The answer might assist determine who wins over the Democratic base, and maybe the nation, come November.

When he arrived, Biden the prospect still winked and shot finger guns at well-wishers and hugged them afterwards, but it was Biden the commander-in-chief that his advisors wanted on display screen.

To Biden’s aides, it was their guy’s opportunity to seize the minute.

” The more the world appears in chaos, particularly with Trump as an irregular accelerant to that chaos, the more individuals appear to be looking for some return to normalcy and strong and steady management as opposed to erratic leadership,” stated a Biden consultant.

The voter stated, he ‘d gotten two of the most significant questions in recent years wrong: the 2002 Iraq War vote when he was a senator and the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which Biden, then vice president, counseled Obama against.

Biden was a senator for 36 years and vice president for 8.

On Iraq, Biden gave a familiar response that Democratic senators who elected the intrusion have actually been making for 17 years: It was a vote to give President George W. Bush take advantage of at the United Nations to reinforce a weapons assessment routine, not to greenlight an impending attack. (This is traditionally accurate, but a bit like arguing you let a college-aged good friend borrow your credit card just for purchasing books for his fraternity and then being shocked about all the pot and booze he contributed to the expense.)

On the bin Laden raid, Biden, changing his story a bit, insisted that after a larger meeting at which he revealed reservations, he privately told Obama to go all out. (During his prolonged reaction, at one point, Biden inadvertently stated Saddam Hussein when he meant Osama bin Laden.)

Regardless of the hard question, Biden appeared pleased. If the subject is foreign policy, Biden thinks he’s winning.

Bernie Sanders was the only rival who appeared to invite that challenge. While Biden’s method is that of a conventional main frontrunner– overlook your primary opponents and focus on your basic election opponent– Sanders has the timeless technique for the person in the No. 2 spot: argue it’s a two-person race.

In Iowa last weekend, where there were lots of candidate events, Sanders was the only other politician who appeared to delight in discussing the conflict with Iran– and how the Iraq war and the Democrats who supported it helped produce the existing circumstance.

” What Iran has done is truly highlighted both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden as agents of 2 various poles in the Democratic celebration: one a lot more hawkish interventionist arm of the celebration, which utilized to be dominant, and then Bernie Sanders, representing a more diplomacy-oriented technique, a more collective global technique that is ascendant in the party,” stated Jeff Weaver, one of Sanders’s top advisers, who went on to ding Biden for the 2002 Iraq vote.

The typical assumption about Democratic base politics has been that the domestic exceeds the worldwide, that voters in Dubuque would rather hear about how prospects are going to repair their healthcare than about how they’re going to fix the Middle East.

But that’s not entirely real.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War was perhaps the single essential argument he made to reveal voters that, according to the 2 buzzwords of the primary, his “judgment” transcended to Hillary Clinton’s “experience.” By then, voters had grown tired of the body bags getting back from Baghdad and Kandahar, and the politics of the wars had ricocheted versus the Republican politician Party and hawks like John McCain. Obama soon made it clear that voting to invade Iraq didn’t disqualify Democrats from governing. He chose Biden, who, like Clinton, voted to license the war, as his running mate and made Clinton his secretary of state. In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders was not able to run the very same play against Clinton. He frequently highlighted her Iraq vote to no obtain.

This election, 2020, looked like it may be various. However Iran has belatedly required a serious foreign-policy dispute amongst the major Democratic prospects, with Sanders and Biden representing opposite sides of a basic question that could define the next administration: What do Democrats think about America’s role on the planet? And do they have a national-security message that can beat Trump’s chest-thumping bravado?

Earlier on the same day Biden spoke, Sanders stumped in Grundy Center, about 90 minutes northeast of Des Moines. It was a little working class audience and Sanders, after blasting Biden on Iran for the electronic cameras, went back to healthcare.

Though the term is not often utilized nowadays, the Sanders town hall format is what sixties-era activists utilized to call “consciousness raising.” He prods normal people to stand and describe for their fellow people the wickedness they’ve experienced in the American healthcare system. Older radicals utilized the method to make working individuals aware that they were oppressed, that they weren’t the only ones, and that they could do something about it.

These sessions normally emerge numerous unfortunate stories that Sanders has a regular joke about how his spouse Jane grumbles that his events are too depressing. He then indicates an aide who will be handing out Prozac en route out.

The Sanders view is that, quite actually, this is how the transformation starts.

” I was mayor of the city of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980 s, when the Soviet Union was our opponent,” he said in a 2017 address at Westminster College, in Missouri. Hatred and wars are frequently based on worry and ignorance.

However how that good insight equates into policy has actually been a battle for Sanders to articulate.

Sanders’s foreign-policy views were very first formed by his left-wing advocacy throughout the Cold War, when the animating force on the far left was opposition to American adventurism in the name of anti-communism. As the mayor of Vermont’s biggest city– a small town of 40,00, truly– Sanders really had a foreign policy. He visited Cuba, he became involved in Latin American politics centered on opposition to anything that resembled U.S. imperialism, and he and Jane even honeymooned in the Soviet Union in1988 (This litany of activities is often raised by Sanders’ rivals as deeply bothersome for a general election versus Trump.)

However when he got to Congress in 1991, Sanders invested the next few years, first as a member of your home and then as a senator, oddly withdrawn in foreign policy. When he ran for president in 2016, the old image of Sanders from his mayoral days as a pro-Sandinista Chomskyite is what stuck.

His 2017 speech was implied to address that.

Sanders still peppers his foreign-policy remarks with a long recitation of America’s anti-democratic history, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, during the Cold War, and the worst errors of the post-9/11 age. However with time he has actually gradually moved from a focus on how America has actually screwed up the world in the past to how to face looming threats to global democracy today.

He has actually repeatedly applauded America’s role in developing the United Nations and revealed deep adoration for the Marshall Plan, which assisted reconstruct Germany and western Europe after The second world war. In 2018, he determined growing authoritarianism as one of the fantastic diplomacy difficulties for the United States. It was a turning point for Sanders: The villains in that speech are not Americans meddling in Chile or getting into Iraq, but the “the authoritarian axis”– an expression that echoed Bush’s “axis of evil”– and in Sanders’s informing includes nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Turkey and Brazil, where there are “motions led by demagogues who make use of individuals’s worries, prejudices and complaints to gain and hang on to power” and are likewise handmaidens to billionaires and oligarchs, more familiar Sanders bogeymen.

While he required a motion to “fight the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism,” the details of how a Sanders administration would use American power to do that have been unclear. He had determined what he thought was the hazard of our time but he didn’t say how America might counter it.

On The Other Hand, Biden, along with the majority of foreign policy centrists in the Democratic Party, has actually also moved. Biden and his ideological kin have recognized that there is nearly no constituency left in the Democratic Party for the kind of hawks that controlled in the nineties and early 2000 s.

But on the concern of American management and whether American power can be virtuous, Biden is indisputable. His campaign is predicated on the idea that a President Biden can rapidly bring back America’s function as a force for good.

In talking to Democratic foreign policy advisors throughout the spectrum, I heard people in Biden’s orbit caricature Sanders as a Corbyn-like old leftist who never outgrew his extreme roots. The fact is that Democratic citizens have actually required both males to shift: Sanders to accept that if he desires to be president he needs to be comfortable with taking the reins of a superpower and Biden with the truth that the tradition of the Iraq War has poisoned the concept of liberal interventionism to a whole generation.

All 3– Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg– have tried to articulate an alternative vision to a Biden-style establishment Democratic foreign policy– what Sanders’ advisors call the D.C. “blob.”

And there are notable distinctions on some essential issues. Sanders and Warren want to utilize help to Israel to change the country’s behavior toward the Palestinians, while Biden isn’t. Sanders opposes the current USMCA trade offer, while Warren and Biden support it. Sanders and Warren would leave almost no footprint behind in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Buttigieg and Biden desire some forces to respond to any revival of al Qaeda and ISIS.

Progressives have also changed the politics of foreign policy.

In 2020 the pressure for Democrats in their reaction to the killing of Soleimani was to reveal they would not overemphasize or harp on his criminal activities in the Middle East and that they would not say anything that would motivate escalation with Iran. Warren initially tweeted that “Soleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, consisting of numerous Americans.” The next day, in a tweet that focused entirely on Trump, she composed that the president had “assassinated a senior foreign military official.” Gone was any description of Soleimani’s history in the region.

But in the end, the 2020 foreign policy dispute among Democrats is likely to play out a lot like the 2020 domestic policy argument amongst Democrats: with the establishment candidate co-opting simply enough of the left’s grievances to off the difficulty.

The Sanders wing long ago won the dispute about playing down using force, ending “permanently wars,” prioritizing diplomacy, and bolstering relationships with democracies. What the progressives have not yet been able to totally articulate– and there’s a huge literature that has actually attempted– is how a President Sanders or Warren or even Buttigieg, who have actually all determined promoting democracy and curtailing the increase of authoritarianism as major contemporary concerns, would in fact do that.

I asked a leading consultant to Sanders about whether there are more information to add to Sanders’ 2018 call to reverse the increasing tide of autocrats.

” We’re dealing with it,” he said.

The post Biden and Bernie duke it out on war and peace appeared first on Actu Trends.

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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Biden and Bernie duke it out on war and peace

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/biden-and-bernie-duke-it-out-on-war-and-peace/

Biden and Bernie duke it out on war and peace

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Last Saturday in Iowa, the day after an American MQ-9 Reaper dropped its ordnance on Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Joe Biden moved quickly to make himself the face of Democratic opposition to Trump’s drone strike. It was early evening at a Des Moines elementary school gymnasium, and despite the dip in temperature and the long lines to get inside, a larger and more engaged audience than the ones he attracted over the summer and fall was waiting for the former vice president.

It was a white-collar crowd—Des Moines-area lawyers and insurance industry professionals and a smattering of D.C. Obama veterans now in town to help Biden in the homestretch. The top lawyer at ICE under the last administration was there, and told me it was the first time he’d ever canvassed Iowa for a candidate.

Iran had heightened the stakes. “#WWIII” was trending online and predictions of an all-out war were commonplace. Trump might now benefit from the halo that glows atop all wartime leaders, at least for a time. And the importance of the outcome of the Democratic primary—to say nothing of the country and the world— had suddenly ballooned. Would voters want an experienced hand whose position on world affairs is basically, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing” (Biden) or would they gravitate toward someone like Bernie Sanders, whose ringing calls to get the U.S. out of Middle East quagmires have the benefit of clarity, but make many a D.C. foreign-policy hand queasy? The answer may help determine who wins over the Democratic base, and perhaps the country, come November.

While waiting for Biden that evening in Des Moines, one of the pre-program speakers led the crowd in singing “God Bless America.” When he arrived, Biden the candidate still winked and shot finger guns at well-wishers and hugged them afterwards, but it was Biden the commander-in-chief that his advisers wanted on display. The former veep pilloried what he viewed as Trump’s recklessness and called for congressional authorization of any further military engagement with Iran. His aides began planning a major speech on the issue in New York for the following Tuesday.

To Biden’s aides, it was their man’s chance to seize the moment.

“The more the world seems in disarray, especially with Trump as an erratic accelerant to that disarray, the more people seem to be looking for some return to normalcy and strong and steady leadership as opposed to erratic leadership,” said a Biden adviser. “There’s now an even greater premium on experience and being ready on Day One to deal with the mess Trump leaves. To state the obvious, that plays to Biden’s strengths.”

But it also plays to some of his weaknesses. A young voter stood up and asked Biden “How could we trust your judgment?” After all, the voter said, he’d gotten two of the biggest questions in recent years wrong: the 2002 Iraq War vote when he was a senator and the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which Biden, then vice president, counseled Obama against.

Biden was a senator for 36 years and vice president for eight. His response was essentially that the questioner was cherry-picking two decisions and ignoring everything else in his record. What about his role in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic or his advice—ignored by Obama—not to surge troops into Afghanistan in 2009 or his rallying NATO to confront Russia over Ukraine?

On Iraq, Biden gave a familiar answer that Democratic senators who voted for the invasion have been making for 17 years: It was a vote to give President George W. Bush leverage at the United Nations to bolster a weapons inspection regime, not to greenlight an imminent attack. (This is historically accurate, but a bit like arguing you let a college-aged friend borrow your credit card only for buying books for his fraternity and then being surprised about all the pot and booze he added to the bill.)

On the bin Laden raid, Biden, changing his story a bit, insisted that after a larger meeting at which he expressed reservations, he privately told Obama to go for it. (During his lengthy response, at one point, Biden accidentally said Saddam Hussein when he meant Osama bin Laden.)

Despite the tough question, Biden seemed pleased. If the subject is foreign policy, Biden believes he’s winning. He’d rather talk for hours defending his worst foreign policy blunders than spend a minute focusing on, say, busing or bankruptcy reform. “It’s not to suggest I didn’t make mistakes in my career,” he told the young questioner in Des Moines. “But I will put my record against anyone in public life in terms of foreign policy.”

Bernie Sanders was the only rival who seemed to welcome that challenge. While Biden’s strategy is that of a traditional primary frontrunner—ignore your primary opponents and focus on your general election opponent—Sanders has the classic strategy for the person in the No. 2 spot: argue it’s a two-person race.

In Iowa last weekend, where there were dozens of candidate events, Sanders was the only other politician who seemed to relish discussing the confrontation with Iran — and how the Iraq war and the Democrats who supported it helped bring about the current situation.

“What Iran has done is really highlighted both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden as representatives of two different poles in the Democratic party: one a much more hawkish interventionist arm of the party, which used to be dominant, and then Bernie Sanders, representing a more diplomacy-oriented approach, a more collaborative international approach that is ascendant in the party,” said Jeff Weaver, one of Sanders’s top advisers, who went on to ding Biden for the 2002 Iraq vote.

The common assumption about Democratic base politics has been that the domestic trumps the international, that voters in Dubuque would rather hear about how candidates are going to fix their healthcare than about how they’re going to fix the Middle East.

But that’s not entirely true. Every open Democratic primary since 9/11 has been about war, and the beneficiary of the debate over that issue hasn’t been easy to predict. In 2004, another insurgent Vermonter — Howard Dean — based his entire candidacy on his opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was enormously unpopular among Democrats and which John Kerry had voted to authorize. Kerry, after struggling in 2003, when Dean’s antiwar message thrilled liberals and filled stadiums, easily defeated his New England rival when voting began in 2004.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War was perhaps the single most important argument he made to show voters that, according to the two buzzwords of the primary, his “judgment” was superior to Hillary Clinton’s “experience.” By then, voters had grown tired of the body bags coming home from Baghdad and Kandahar, and the politics of the wars had ricocheted against the Republican Party and hawks like John McCain. But Obama soon made it clear that voting to invade Iraq didn’t disqualify Democrats from governing. He chose Biden, who, like Clinton, voted to authorize the war, as his running mate and made Clinton his secretary of state. In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders was unable to run the same play against Clinton. He frequently highlighted her Iraq vote to no avail.

This election, 2020, seemed like it might be different. But Iran has belatedly forced a serious foreign-policy debate among the major Democratic candidates, with Sanders and Biden representing opposite sides of a basic question that could define the next administration: What do Democrats believe about America’s role in the world? And do they have a national-security message that can defeat Trump’s chest-thumping bravado?

***

Earlier on the same day Biden spoke, Sanders stumped in Grundy Center, about 90 minutes northeast of Des Moines. It was a small working class audience and Sanders, after blasting Biden on Iran for the cameras, returned to health care.

Though the term is not often used nowadays, the Sanders town hall format is what sixties-era activists used to call “consciousness raising.” He prods ordinary people to stand up and describe for their fellow citizens the depravities they’ve experienced in the American healthcare system. Older radicals used the method to make working people aware that they were oppressed, that they weren’t the only ones, and that they could do something about it.

These sessions usually surface so many sad stories that Sanders has a regular joke about how his wife Jane complains that his events are too depressing. He then points to an aide who will be handing out Prozac on the way out.

The Sanders view is that, quite literally, this is how the revolution starts. Raise enough consciousness among regular people about the vagaries of the health insurance industry and eventually people will be organizing together and clamoring to trade in their own insurance plans in favor of Medicare for All. This is not just how Sanders sees healthcare, but it’s how he sees almost every issue, including foreign policy.

“I was mayor of the city of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was our enemy,” he said in a 2017 address at Westminster College, in Missouri. “We established a sister city program with the Russian city of Yaroslavl, a program which still exists today. I will never forget seeing Russian boys and girls visiting Vermont, getting to know American kids, and becoming good friends. Hatred and wars are often based on fear and ignorance. The way to defeat this ignorance and diminish this fear is through meeting with others and understanding the way they see the world. Good foreign policy means building people-to-people relationships.”

But how that commendable insight translates into policy has been a struggle for Sanders to articulate.

Sanders’s foreign-policy views were first shaped by his left-wing activism during the Cold War, when the animating force on the far left was opposition to American adventurism in the name of anti-communism. As the mayor of Vermont’s largest city—a small town of 40,00, really—Sanders actually had a foreign policy. He visited Cuba, he became involved in Latin American politics centered on opposition to anything that smacked of U.S. imperialism, and he and Jane even honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988. (This litany of activities is frequently raised by Sanders’ rivals as deeply problematic for a general election against Trump.)

But when he got to Congress in 1991, Sanders spent the next few decades, first as a member of the House and then as a senator, strangely uninterested in foreign policy. When he ran for president in 2016, the old image of Sanders from his mayoral days as a pro-Sandinista Chomskyite is what stuck.

His 2017 speech was meant to address that. For years now, progressives have been debating how to articulate an American foreign policy that rejects what they see as the militarism of liberal internationalists, who make up the Democratic Party establishment, and left-wingers who reject any use of American power in the world as inherently tainted. Arguably, that was something Obama managed to achieve, but many on the left viewed him as just another militarist by the time he left office.

Sanders still peppers his foreign-policy remarks with a long recitation of America’s anti-democratic history, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, during the Cold War, and the worst mistakes of the post-9/11 era. But over time he has gradually shifted from an emphasis on how America has messed up the world in the past to how to confront looming threats to international democracy today.

He has repeatedly praised America’s role in creating the United Nations and expressed deep admiration for the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Germany and western Europe after World War II. In 2018, he identified growing authoritarianism as one of the great foreign policy challenges for the United States. It was a turning point for Sanders: The villains in that speech are not Americans meddling in Chile or invading Iraq, but the “the authoritarian axis”—a phrase that echoed Bush’s “axis of evil”—and in Sanders’s telling includes countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Turkey and Brazil, where there are “movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power” and are also handmaidens to billionaires and oligarchs, more familiar Sanders bogeymen.

While he called for a movement to “combat the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism,” the details of how a Sanders administration would use American power to do that have been vague. He had identified what he believed was the threat of our time but he didn’t say how America could counter it.

Meanwhile, Biden, along with most foreign policy centrists in the Democratic Party, has also shifted. As he pointed out in Iowa, Biden was a forceful internal opponent of the Obama surge in Afghanistan. He was deeply skeptical of the Libya intervention, which Obama came to regret, and Biden has recently called for removing most troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Biden and his ideological kin have recognized that there is almost no constituency left in the Democratic Party for the kind of hawks that dominated in the nineties and early 2000s.

But on the question of American leadership and whether American power can be virtuous, Biden is unequivocal. His campaign is premised on the idea that a President Biden can quickly restore America’s role as a force for good. For progressives that is not comforting. They fear that Biden and his advisers could easily revert to the hawkishness that dominated recent history.

In talking to Democratic foreign policy advisers across the spectrum, I heard people in Biden’s orbit caricature Sanders as a Corbyn-like old leftist who never outgrew his radical roots. And I heard Sanders’ allies describe Biden as a bloodthirsty neoliberal warmonger who will return to militarism once elected. The truth is that Democratic voters have forced both men to shift: Sanders to accept that if he wants to be president he needs to be comfortable with taking the reins of a superpower and Biden with the fact that the legacy of the Iraq War has poisoned the idea of liberal interventionism to an entire generation. (Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg fit neatly on this continuum, with Warren closer to Sanders and Buttigieg closer to Biden.)

All three—Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg—have tried to articulate an alternative vision to a Biden-style establishment Democratic foreign policy — what Sanders’ advisers call the D.C. “blob.”

And there are notable differences on some key issues. Sanders and Warren are willing to leverage aid to Israel to change the country’s behavior toward the Palestinians, while Biden isn’t. Sanders opposes the recent USMCA trade deal, while Warren and Biden support it. Sanders and Warren would leave almost no footprint behind in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Buttigieg and Biden want some forces to respond to any resurgence of al Qaeda and ISIS.

Progressives have also changed the politics of foreign policy. Democrats across the spectrum no longer believe that a reflexive toughness to international crises is a prerequisite for victory. In 2004 Kerry, who in his youth was most famous for his opposition to the Vietnam war, reinvented himself as a war fighter for the general election. (He lost.)

In 2020 the pressure for Democrats in their response to the killing of Soleimani was to show they would not exaggerate or dwell on his crimes in the Middle East and that they would not say anything that would encourage escalation with Iran. Warren originally tweeted that “Soleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.” The next day, in a tweet that focused solely on Trump, she wrote that the president had “assassinated a senior foreign military official.” Gone was any description of Soleimani’s history in the region.

But in the end, the 2020 foreign policy debate among Democrats is likely to play out a lot like the 2020 domestic policy debate among Democrats: with the establishment candidate co-opting just enough of the left’s grievances to snuff out the challenge.

The Sanders wing long ago won the debate about deemphasizing the use of force, ending “forever wars,” prioritizing diplomacy, and bolstering relationships with democracies. But what the progressives have not yet been able to fully articulate—and there’s a vast literature that has tried—is how a President Sanders or Warren or even Buttigieg, who have all identified promoting democracy and curtailing the rise of authoritarianism as major modern priorities, would actually do that.

I asked a top adviser to Sanders about whether there are more details to add to Sanders’ 2018 call to reverse the rising tide of autocrats.

“We’re working on it,” he said.

#Bernie #Foreign #Peace #Politics

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topsolarpanels · 7 years

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Al Gore: ‘The riches have subverted all reason’

With the sequel to his blockbuster documentary An Inconvenient Truth about to be released, Al Gore tells Carole Cadwalladr how his role at the forefront of the fight against climate change eats his life

In the ballroom of a conference centre in Denver, Colorado, 972 people from 42 countries have come together to talk about climate change. It is March 2017, six weeks since Trumps inauguration; eight weeks before Trump will announce to the world that he is withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Agreement.

These are the early dark days of the new America and yet, in the conference centre, the crowd is upbeat. Theyve all paid out of their own pockets to travel to Denver. They have taken time off work. And they are here, in the presence of their master, Al Gore. Because Al Gore is to climate change well, what Donald Trump is to climate change denial.

Disaster zone: extermination in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey. Photograph: Mike Groll/ AP

Its 10 years since the reason for this, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth , was released into cinema. It was an improbable project on almost every level: a film about what was then practically a non-subject, starring “the mens” best known for not winning the 2000 US election, its beating heart and the engine of its narrative drive a PowerPoint presentation.

When the filmmakers approached him, he explains to the room, I thought they were nuts. A movie of a slideshow, delivered by Al Gore, what doesnt scream blockbuster about it? Except it was a blockbuster. In documentary words, anyway. The careful accretion of facts and figures genuinely shocked people. And its a measure of the impact it had, and still continues to have, that Gore delivers this vignette to a rapt crowd who, over the course of three days, are learning how to be Climate Reality Leaders.

Its the reason why we are all here his foundation, the Climate Reality Project, an initiative that grew out of the film, provides intensive training in talking about climate change, combating climate change denial and the tone might be described as activist upbeat. This is a crisis that is solvable, were told. Trump is just another hitch, another impediment to overcome. And it will be overcome. Only occasionally does a sliver of desperation leak around the edges. You have to stay positive, a man called David Ellenberger tells the audience. Though sometimes, he acknowledges: Theres not sufficient Prozac to get through the day.

Its almost a relief to hear person acknowledge this. Because before there was FAKE NEWS !!! and the FAILING New York Times ! Trump was tweeting about GLOBAL WARMING hoaxsters! and GLOBAL WARMING bullshit! The war on the mainstream media may capture the headlines currently, but the war against climate change science has been in play for years. And its this that is one of the most fascinating aspects of Gores new cinema, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power . Because if the US had a subtitle at the moment, it might be that, too, and the struggle to overcome fake facts and false narrations shall be financed by corporate interests and politically motivated billionaires is one that Gore has been at the frontline of for more than a decade.

Breaking phase: a huge fissure in the Larsen C ice shelf in the Antarctica. Photograph: Nasa/ John Sonntag/ EPA

The film runs through a host of facts that 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have passed since 2001 is just one. And the accompanying footage is biblical, frightening: tornadoes, deluges, rainfall bombs, exploding glaciers. We find roads falling into rivers and fish swimming through the street of Miami.

The nightly news, Gore says, has become a nature hike through the Book of Revelations. But what his run has shown and continues to show is that evidence is sufficient to. The film opens with clips from Fox News ridiculing global warming. In recent weeks, the New York Times has started describing the Trump administration as waging a war on science, a full-on assault against evidence-based science that runs in parallel with his attacks on evidence-based reporting. And Gore is in something of a unique position to understand this. What becomes clear over the course of several conversations is how entwined he believes it all is climate change refusal, the interests of big capital, dark money, billionaire political funders, the dominance of Trump and what he calls( hes written a volume on it) the assault against reason. They are all pieces of the same puzzle; a puzzle that Gore has been tracking for years, because it turns out that climate change denial was the canary in the coal mine.

In order to fix the climate crisis, we need to first fix the government crisis, he says. Big money has so much influence now. And he says a phrase that is as dramatic as it is multilayered: Our democracy has been hacked. Its something I hear him recur to the audience in the ballroom, in a room backstage, a few a few weeks later in London, and finally on the phone earlier this month.

Popular backlash: protesters demonstrate against the Koch brothers, funders of climate change denial. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/ AFP/ Getty Images

What do you entail by it exactly? I mean that those with access to large amounts of fund and raw power, says Gore, have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch friends are the largest funders of climate change refusal. And ExxonMobil claims it has stopped, but it genuinely hasnt. It has given a one-quarter of a billion dollars in donations to climate denial groups. Its clear they attempt to cripple our ability to respond to this existential threat.

One of Trumps first acts after his inauguration was to remove all mentions of climate change from federal websites. More overlooked is that one of Theresa Mays first actions on becoming prime minister within 24 hours of taking office was to close the Department for Energy and Climate Change; subsequently gifts from oil and gas companies to the Conservative party continued to roll in. And what is increasingly apparent is that the same think tank that operate in the Nations are also at work in Britain, and climate change denial operating the a bridgehead: unifying the right and providing an entry road for other tenets of Alt-Right notion. And, its this network of power that Gore has had to try to understand, in order to find a way to combat it.

In Tennessee we have an expression: If you consider a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didnt get there by itself. And if you watch these levels of climate denial, you can be pretty sure it didnt merely spread itself. The big carbon polluters have expended between$ 1bn and$ 2bn spreading false doubt. Do you know the book, Merchants of Doubt ? It documents how the tobacco industry discredited the consensus on cigarette smoking and cancer by creating doubt, and shows how its linked to the climate denial movement. They hired many of the same PR firms and some of the same think tanks. And, in fact, some of those who work on climate change refusal actually still dispute the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

End of the road: the Gave de Pau river overflows after unseasonal storms in France. Photo: Laurent Dard/ AFP/ Getty Images

The big change between our first dialogue in Denver and our last, on the phone this month, is the news that Gore had been desperately hoping wouldnt happen: Trumps announcement on 1 June that he was pulling America out of the Paris Agreement. The negotiations in Paris are right at the heart of the new movie, its emotional centre, and when I watch it in March, the ending still find Gore carrying guarded optimism.

So , what happened? I was wrong, he says on the phone from Australia, where hes been promoting the film. Based on what he told me, I definitely supposed there was a better than even chance he might choose to stay in. But I was wrong. I was fearful that other countries for whom it was a close call would follow his result, but Im thrilled the reaction has been exactly the opposite. The other 19 members of the G20 have reiterated that Paris is irreversible. And governors and mayors all over the country have been saying we are all still in and, in fact, its just going to stimulate us redouble our commitments.

The film “mustve been” recut, the ending changed, the gloves are now off. What changed Trumps mind? I suppose Steve Bannon and his crowd set a big push on Trump and persuaded him that he needed to give this to his base advocates. He had blood in his eyes. Its instructive because Bannon, Trumps chief strategist, is also the ideologue behind Trumps assault on the media. And Bannons understanding of the news and information space, and make further efforts to manipulate it via Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, both funded by another key climate change denier, Robert Mercer, are at the heart of the Trump agenda.

And what becomes clear if you Google climate change is how effective the right has been in owning the subject. YouTubes results are dominated by nothing but climate change denial videos. This isnt news for Gore. He has multiple high-level links to Silicon Valley. Hes on the board of Apple and used to be an adviser for Google. We are fully aware of their own problems, he says with what sounds like resigned understatement. Gore has had more than a decade fighting climate change refusal, and in some respects, the problem has simply worsened and deepened.

On the other hand, two-thirds of the American people are convinced that its an extremely serious crisis and we have to take it on, he says. And there is a law of physics that every action makes an equal and opposite reaction. And I do think there is a reaction to the Trump/ Brexit/ Alt-Right populist authoritarianism around the world. People who took liberal democracy more or less for granted are now awakening to a sense that it can only be defended by the people themselves.

Man on a mission: Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. Photo: Paramount Pictures

And its in this, his belief in social progress against all odds, that he takes his result from the civil rights motion. The cut of the cinema I see compares the climate change movement to the other great social movements that eventually won out: the abolition of slavery, womens suffrage, civil right. Something profound and disturbing is happening right now, though, he admits. The information system is in such a chaotic transition and people are deluged with so much noise that it devotes an opening for Trump and his forces to wage war against facts and reason.

Is it, as some people describe, an info war? Absolutely, he says. Theres no question about it.

What there isnt much of, in the film, is Al Gore, “the mens”. In 2010, he split from Tipper, his wife of 40 years and the mother of his two grown-up daughters, and what becomes clear is just how much of his life the fight takes up. When I catch up with him next, hes in London for a board meeting of his green-focused investment firm, Generation Investment Management, and I ask him to tell me about his recent travels.

Two weeks ago, I had three red-eyes in five days. Ive been in Sweden, the Netherlands, Sharjah, then lets insure, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. Where else? he asks his assistant.

Vegas, she says. We did CinemaCon.

Vegas, we did that. And then, lets ensure, Nashville, on my farm.

Focus on facts: Al Gore in An Inconvenient Sequel. Photo: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

I assume this sum of travelling is connected to the release of the film, but no. Ive been at this level for the past 10 years and longer. He hesitates to use the word mission, he says, and then use it. When you feel a sense of purpose that seems to justify pouring everything you can into it, it induces it easier to get up in the morning.

He does tell me a bit about his parents though. He describes his father, Al Gore Sr, who grew up poor then became a lawyer and a legislator, as a hero to me. And it was at the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, that he held the first Climate Reality training, an informal get-together of 50 people that has morphed into the event I witnessed in Denver. Theres no type or demographic, I shared a table with a disparate group including a consultant for the aerospace industry, a French lawyer and an American cook. And they seemed to have almost nothing in common aside from their passion to do something about climate change. Im a gardener so Im assuring whats happening with my own eyes, the cook, Susan Kutner, told me. You cant ignore it.

In light of Trumps fixation with fake news, its fascinating to find. Gore has been fighting disinformation for more than a decade. And, hes developed his educate program counter to the predominating ideology. The answer is not online. Social media will not save us. We will not click climate change away. The answer hes come up with is low-tech, old-fashioned, human. He takes the time to talk to people immediately, one to one, in the hope they will speak to other people who will speak to other people.

The course is run by Gore. He is on stage virtually the entire time over three intensive days. And the heart of it is still the slideshow. One of his aides tells me how he was up until 2am the night before. Hes preoccupied with his slides, he has 30,000 of them and he switches them around all the time.

Tinder dry: changing climate has find an upturn in woodland flames around the world. Photo: Jae C Hong/ AP

In the movie, you consider him perpetually hustling, calling world leaders, rounding up solar energy entrepreneurs, developing activists. Hearing information from people you know is at the heart of his strategy. You need people who will look you in the eye and say: Look, this is what Ive learned, this is what you need to know. It works. Ive watched it run. It is working. And its just getting started. Weve get 12,000 trained leaders now.

How many people do you think its impacted?

Millions. Honestly, millions. And a non- trivial percentage of them have gone on to become pastors in their countries governments or take leadership roles in international organisations. Theyve had an outsized impact. Christiana Figueres[ the UN climate chief ], who operated the Paris meeting, she was in the second training session I did in Tennessee. And, right now, people are get really fired up.

Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his efforts in combating climate change, but in some way it feels like hes just getting started. The rest of the world is only now cottoning on to the enlightenment battle thats at the heart of it a battle royal to defend facts and reason against people and forces-out for whom its a truth too inconvenient to permit. For Gore, the US oil companies are the ultimate culprits, but its only just becoming apparent that Russia has also played a role, amplifying messages around climate change as it did around the other issues at the heart of Trumps agenda, and we segue into his visits to Russia in the early 90 s, during one of which he fulfilled Putin for the first time.

What did you induce of him? I would not have thought of him as the future chairperson of Russia. I once did a televised town hall event to the whole of Russia and Putin was the one who was in charge of inducing sure all the cables were connected and whatnot.

Revenge is tweet: an image of Trump is projected by Greenpeace on to the US Embassy in Berlin after he declared that America was pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Photo: Michael Sohn/ AP

What does he construct of the investigations into Russian interference? I guess the investigation of the Trump campaigns collusions with the Russians and the existence of fiscal levers of Putin over Trump is proceeding with its own rhythm beneath the news cycle, and may well ten-strike pay dirt. Its also worth pointing out that when someone passed his campaign stolen information about George W Bushs debate research, he handed it to the FBI.

And then he astounds me by pulling out a reference to an interview I conducted with Arron Bank, the Bristol businessman who funded Nigel Farages Leave campaign. Hes been reading up about the links between Brexit and Trump, and Bankss and Farages support of Putin and Russia. He told you: Russia needs a strong man, didnt he? And you hear that in the US, and I dont think its fair to the Russians. I am a true disciple in the superiority of representative republic where there is a healthy ecosystem characterised by free speech and an informed citizenry. I genuinely defy the slur against any nation that theyre incapable of governing themselves.

Brexit, Trump, climate change, oil producers, dark fund, Russian influence, a full- frontal assault on facts, evidence, journalism, science, its all connected. Ask Al Gore. You may want to watch Wonder Woman the summer months, but to understand the new reality were living in, you really should watch An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power . Because, scaring because this is, in some ways the times of typhoons and exploding glaciers are just the start of it.

Al Gore Live in Conversation followed by a screening of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power , for one night merely Friday 11 August in cinemas everywhere. Book your tickets at po.st/ aninconvenientsequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is in cinema everywhere from 18 August. The cinema also opens the Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House, 10 -2 3 August, somersethouse.org.uk

The Observer Ethical Awardings: how to enter

To vote, going to see theguardian.com/ environment/ 2017/ jul/ 25/ vote-in-the-observer-ethical-awards-2 017 or email ethical.awards @observer. co.uk with the category title in the subject header. Then tell us in no more than 200 words why you, or your nominee, deserves to be recognised. Feel free to attach paintings, a short movie or relevant connections. The closing date is 15 September. For more information, going to see observer.co.uk/ ethical-awards