Narcissistic Collapse...

 

© August 2, 2023, the Griot Poet

“Narcissistic collapse occurs when a narcissist’s ability to uphold their grandiose, confident image is threatened. As a result, they often become enraged, resulting in impulsivity, intense lashing out, or harm to others. While this reaction isn’t typically intentional, it’s a way for the narcissist to re-establish a sense of control.

 

“People with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) often look down on others to maintain the positive images they hold about themselves. If their behavior is called out or challenged, their fragile self-esteem is damaged, resulting in intense reactions and abuse toward others.”

 

Source: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/

 

Half of the country experienced a narcissistic collapse in 1861,

The previous year, Stephen Douglas, the candidate for the presidency representing the South, lost to a lanky lawmaker from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.

Not able to accept the outcome of a free and fair election,

Starting with South Carolina and ending with Texas,

Each entered into history,

Their disapproval of the new Republican Party,

And the President-Elect, Abraham Lincoln,

Offering Articles of Secession,

Patterned after the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech,”

Each elucidates the false narrative of the “inferior African.”

 

Source: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

 

Illustrating the difference between the North and the South,

And a full-throated defense of Antebellum enslavement.

 

The same who plowed their fields and made their wealth,

The same whose flesh was so “wretched,” they sired Mullatto children and practiced “buck breaking” of men in front of their families.

History is whitewashed because of its depravity.

 

They engaged in an act of “creative fiction.”

After losing the war against the North,

It became the first “Big Lie” in the “Lost Cause” narrative.

Nathan Bedford Forrest formed a domestic terrorist organization,

Haunting the newly freed women and men as evil spirits.

 

Cyrus I. Scofield,

In an extension of this literary tradition,

Without education or training in theology,

Wrote a study Bible,

Used today in seminaries,

Popularizing the rapture,

An escape hatch for the losing side in an uncivil conflict,

That eschatology, prior to the Civil War, did not exist.

It was to escape for them a world that had become a hellscape,

 

The War was over, and they were supposed to treat Africans, Asians, Hispanics, Immigrants, and Native Americans like citizens and not beasts.

 

The once dominant caste’s self-esteem was based on the lesser classes’ debasement.

 

Then came Charles Darwin and “Origin of the Species,”

 

They suddenly were not “God’s chosen,”

They weren’t special or divine.

The Scofield Monkey Trials began.

Dressing in sheets, castrations, and burning crosses, they had clearly lost their minds.

 

Racism is the ultimate narcissism.

Every ism and phobia their natural children.

Because,

When the narcissist’s culture, or individual’s “ability to uphold their grandiose, confident image is threatened. They often become enraged, resulting in impulsivity, intense lashing out, or harm to others.”

 

Like a Civil War.

Like lynching.

Like medicine practiced on enslaved women without anesthesia.

Like razing Black townships, Black Wall Street, and Rosewood out of existence.

Like not bothering to pay any of the survivors' reparations.

Like using Black children in Florida as crocodile bait.

Like Jim Crow.

Like Emmitt Till.

Like Trayvon Benjamin Martin.

Like Jordan Davis.

Like Renisha McBride.

Like Breonna Taylor.

Like Sandra Bland.

Like Tamir Rice.

Like George Floyd.

Like stochastic terrorism.

Like Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898.

Like Red Summer, America, 1919.

Like January 6 at the US Capitol.

 

This brief history is giving a few of you cognitive dissonance.

If it was hard for you to hear it, think how gut-wrenching it was to write it.

If it was hard for you to hear it, think how it was for my ancestors to LIVE it!

The solution isn’t to “ban books,” but to man up to our shared history and face it!

 

Peep this:

He’s thrown business partners, lawyers, and close associates under the bus to save his [own] ass: What makes you think that you’re not next?

 

I keep spitting facts because we can’t have peace in this country or on Earth unless a sizable portion of MAGA gets psychological assistance.

 

I am “the voice calling in the wilderness” because you THINK you want a dictatorship, but you, like me, if we’re still alive, will be its servants!

 

I keep challenging your ignorance because we are fifty states, but right now, not united.

 

If we save ourselves from this narcissistic collapse, we can save the planet!