CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS and ABUSIVE SPOUSES
This entry was posted on 2/5/2009 10:38 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Years ago, I spent many long hours volunteering for a local women's shelter. I served on its board, eventually chaired it, and donated 10 percent of the royalties from my first book to it. I gave I don't know how many speeches to civic and law enforcement organizations on the subject. Later, I would update the talk and give it to high school home economics and lifestyle classes to educate the students on date or boyfriend abuse. I also wrote about it in the newspaper column I did locally.
At the time, most people--at least those in small-town America--didn't think such things went on in THEIR town, much less in one out of every four homes, no matter the income, status, class, or color of its inhabitants.
One of the things I learned was that women--(and it is usually women, although there are many men, some gay, who also qualify; they're just not likely to seek help)--the women do not like to be called "battered women." They do not think of themselves that way, which is why I always refer to it as a "women's shelter" and not a "battered women's shelter."
In fact, referring to someone as a "battered woman" means she will be much less likely to seek help, because, as I said, she doesn't think of herself that way and doesn't want to be included with those whom others may think of as "battered." After all, HER husband doesn't BEAT her...he just has a little problem with his temper. He's been under a lot of stress. He's not always like that. He only does those things when he's drunk. Blah blah blah.
But I digress.
This past week, with the president's stimulus bill dangling over the precipice, and recalcitrant Republicans threatening and dramatizing, and frustrated Democrats fuming and frightened that they're going to lose their momentum, and all sorts of howling going on from left to right...well, it just DAWNED on me.
Anyone who's worked with abused spouses for very long know that they are at their very most dangerous right when their husbands feel the most threatened, and are the most anxious...that they are about to LOSE THEIR POWER.
If a woman threatens to leave her abusive husband, or she files for divorce, or breaks up with her boyfriend, or gets a restraining order, or otherwise signals to him that IT IS OVER...What does he do?
He gets more violent.
It is during this time that, tragically, the situation so often turns to murder, or murder-suicide.
The question people most frequently ask about an abused spouse is, Why does she stay?
What they don't realize is that he has been threatening to do such things as kill her family, or take the children and disappear, or kill her, or any number of things.
It is statistically true that an abused spouse is likely to go back to the abuser an average of five times before making the final break.
The reasons for this are varied, but one of them is that he has systematically convinced her, over many years of browbeating, that she CAN'T live without him, that she'll never be able to support herself or that she'll never find another man. By the time she's desperate enough to leave him, she believes it.
It's complicated. The only people who insist that they would never stay have not themselves ever encountered such a situation.
There is a reason that most sophisticated women's shelters always have a panic button that summons police within moments, and have a series of locked doors keeping the main office separate from the entryway.
Just as there is a reason that the most deadly court of law in the country is not criminal court, but divorce court.
And the reason that the most dangerous call police officers make is to domestic situations.
I've made no secret of the fact that I believe the only reason the American people voted Bush and Cronies back into power was that, three years following 9/11, they were still processing their own post traumatic stress. And rather than inspire and comfort the American people during this terrible time, the Bush administration chose to bludgeon them repeatedly with fake security-level color alerts, phony terrorist warnings, and desperate tales of disaster averted through torture.
They kept the American people on edge, and the rest of the world in despair as they battered and bullied their way across the globe in the faux names of "freedom," "democracy," and "security."
And they convinced many otherwise smart Americans that they simply could not survive without the Bush administration to "protect" them.
Even John McCain was forced to complain, "This is real life, folks. It's not an episode of 24."
This is tantamount to abuse.
It is not just abuse of power, it is PSYCHOLOGICAL abuse, and it has been perpetrated by people who knew full well what they were doing--hence all the secrecy, subterfuge, and downright lying.
It's like, the reason you don't see so many battered women, say, in church? It's not because they're not there. It's because their abusive husbands have learned to beat them in places where nobody can see. They use belts or coat hangers on their wive's backs, or kick them in the ribs or stomach. Never the face.
After all, they wouldn't want their boss to find out they beat their wives, would they? It's one of the main reasons wives have not been so good at having their husbands arrested, and why most police departments now arrest routinely after a domestic disturbance call.
The wife doesn't want him to get fired; they need his income. So she will lie and say she fell or whatever.
It's complicated. Nothing is black or white.
Now, the congressional Republicans were enablers of the most abusive administration since Nixon's.
And they weilded TREMENDOUS power.
Why, their own speaker of the house was known as "The Hammer" because of his nasty, bullying, take-no-prisoners style. Moderate voices in their party were labeled RINOs and kicked to the curb or run out of office by their own party.
Their heroes were voices like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly--bullies who cut off mikes and yelled into submission anyone disagreeing with them or, like Coulter, simply sliced them open with mockery and insult, and walked away with a smirk.
In the White House, the talking points were handed down by the likes of Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who not only threatened to destroy anyone who got in their way, but who systematically set about doing so.
This congress had six full years where their party-leader and president NEVER ONCE USED THE VETO. They were given every single little thing they wanted, and if anyone from the opposing party DARED to defy them, they weren't just DEFEATED, they were DESTROYED.
Think Valerie Plame. Think Max Cleland.
Within the governmental bureacracy, career staffers were silenced and censored and bulllied into submission.
This is heady stuff. And they truly believed they were on their way to establishing one-party rule--so much so that they even politicized the justice department, just to ensure more Republican victories at the ballot box, by any means necessary.
Even after 2006, they refused to believe that their spouse--the American people--was leaving them.
When Barack Obama was elected president by a huge mandate, the Democrats gained more seats in congress, and the Inauguration set off worldwide celebrations--it was the equivalent--to congressional Republicans--of a spouse, filing for divorce.
A spouse, taking that step to leave. REALLY LEAVE THIS TIME, not just threaten to leave and then be bullied into returning, but actually, really, truly leave.
The American people have finally reached their breaking point. They're no longer listening to the Republican threats and bluster.
They've fallen out of love and they just don't care anymore.
The party is rapidly losing their power--even symbolically. Note Dick Cheney in a wheelchair at the Inauguration. George W. Bush stepping out on the Inaugural platform and hearing thousands of people sing, NAH NAH NAH NAH, NAH NAH NAH NAH, HEY HEY HEY, GOOD-BYE!!!
So.
How do you THINK they're going to act?
They are going to get more dangerous, more threatening, more belligerent, more shrill and hysterical, more frightening.
And you know what?
The American people are not some trembling woman, fearful for her life. Not only are they newly-empowered by what they have just accomplished in the elections of '08--but by God, they've got a new sheriff in town.
The last sheriff was like the good ole boy, the small-town sheriff who knows everybody and gives the batterer a wink and a nod when called out to the house, but does nothing. Maybe he takes the wife aside and tells her that it is, after all, her responsibility to keep the family together. Maybe he blames her for "provoking" her husband. Maybe he simply tells the husband to calm down, or runs him in to spend the night in jail but sends him home the next day. Maybe, at home, he beats and bullies his own family.
Either way, he is not protecting her.
But we've got a sheriff now who is.
Oh, I know there are those who think he's been too accomodating, that he's done too much to meet the abusive congressional Republicans halfway. They're afraid he won't be strong enough.
Don't be fooled.
He's not above trying to talk sense into them, but when they pull out the big guns and threaten filibuster or vote-down or provision-stripping or whatever their latest bluster and threat...when it gets right down to it, I guarandamntee you, this sheriff will stand in the doorway with a shotgun.
There's not going to be a murder here, folks. Nothing to see. Move right along.
I've worked with good small-town cops and I've worked with bad ones. In big cities, I've ridden patrol with good cops and bad cops too. I've learned how to tell when they're paying attention and when they're not. When they truly care and when they don't.
I know a good one when I see one.
We're still shaky, after all those years of abuse. We're still scared. Some of us are losing our jobs, our homes, our livelihoods and, sometimes, our marriages and families.
We desperately need someone to protect us, but we're seeing the same old crap we've seen so many times before, and we don't know what's going to happen.
It'll be all right though. This president's got our backs.
He's no Dumbledore--he can't wave a magic wand and solve all the problems in one mighty sweep, but that's not what we need right now.
We just need someone to stand tall in the doorway, refuse to break eye contact with a bully, and say, calmly, "It's time for you to leave now."
Abusive spouses usually remain on the scene, one way or the other, because they share children with their exes. And that's all right. As long as he's not abusive to the kids, they need their daddy.
We need opposing voices in government.
But once abusive guys learn that they can no longer beat or bully their wives, they very often will back down. They'll still bluster from time to time, but it just no longer works like it once did.
They'll look for another cowering female they can dominate, or, more rarely, they'll learn from their mistakes and straighten up for the next wife.
Either way, the spouse who had the guts to leave will rebuild her life and, if she's smart, not hook up with another abuser.
The American people behaved, on Inauguration Day, like a woman who has left her no-good bully of a husband behind and has married a far better man who she knows will protect her and always be honest with her and kind to her.
It's a very liberating feeling, and once she's had a chance to see how a good man really behaves, she'll be much savvier, much quicker to recognize abusive behavior in others, and much less likely to put up with it.
So let the Republicans threaten and shout all they want. They just don't realize yet that they no longer possess the power.
We've got the power, now.
And a good man to stand in the doorway when we get scared.
