Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

This is an old Zoltar Speaks! blog post.

After I read of the first couple of paragraphs of Jack Marshall’s June 12, 2018 blog Women Of America: PLEASE Don’t Make Me An Anti-Feminist By Talking Like Anti-Male Bigots! I went into what appeared to be a full-fledged anxiety attack (I was aware of the signs, I’ve never had one of those before, it’s really not fun) followed by an immediate feeling of real anger towards some people I once worked with. I was so angry that I walked out of my office without saying a word to anyone and came real close to just being a depressed slug for the rest of the day, it was as if all my colors were being sucked into a black hole.  I noticed the signs of what was happening and since I’m one to face things head on, I did something about it, I doctored myself.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all that don’t doctor thyself stuff.  I really was quite aware of all the signs and doing what I was doing was actively being therapeutic. I might still go talk to someone later, but that’s a decision to make for tomorrow, right now what I’m doing is good and I’d have to eventually do it anyway.

A brief history before I go on. Many years ago I went through a very, very contentious divorce with an drinking alcoholic, and there were children involved. It was a really bad. During that time my attorney suggested that I talk to a counselor so I had someone to vent to.  I literally had no one at the time outside my attorney because all our so called family friends were basically all her friends and my personal family was far away; I was basically alone. I found a family counselor close by and we hit it off.  One of the many suggestions that he shared was that since I seemed to like writing, maybe I should start writing about everything that was going on, just let the words freely flow and ignore rereading it.  Another suggestion was that I save it all, not so I could constantly reread or dwell on it, but so I could let it go now but still have it for later in life to accurately recall details. That’s what I did, it helped at the time and I’ve routinely continued the practice ever since.  I’ve stored it chronologically ever since then and rarely have I ever felt the need to look back at any of it.

Yesterday there was a real need to look back.

I went to my storage closet where I store all these writings and started digging, remembering, evaluating my feelings, and finally found what I knew was there waiting for me.  I read through a couple of years of writings and today I’m finally at a place where I could start writing about what was happening to me now.

Yesterday evening at the dinner table my wife, in her usual polite manner, asked me what the heck was wrong with me, told her that I had read something that sparked a flood of memories from the time I worked at “that place”.  Having been there to support me going through it so many years ago she immediately understood, so we chat a little over dinner and then I crawled back in my man cave to continue reading all those past writings and reflect on the past and present.  I actually got very little sleep last night, but it was valuable time spent.

After reading all my random writings from back then this might be a bit hard to put it all together, so I’m going to write some, walk away, reread what I wrote, write some more, and repeat until I’m done. When I’m sure that what I’ve written is accurate, I’ll post it.

Here we go….

Many years ago, long before this new social justice warrior inspired wave of anti-male sentiment began, I worked in “that place” (from now on it’s just a facility) where anti-male feminist bigots freely roamed the hallways complaining about men and abusing any man they came in contact with and those around these hateful bigots, including my employer, justified their hateful actions and behaviors by constantly shifting blame away from those people with rationalizations.

Oh wait that’s jumping into it a bit too fast.

Please indulge me for a moment…

Now whip out your very best Julie Andrews voice and sing it with me;

“Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. When you read you begin with ABC. When you…”  …recall you begin with way back then.

I needed a moment of humor. ;)

Way back then I was in a place in my life where circumstances beyond my control put me in a place where I desperately needed to put food on the table for my family and keep a roof over our head. Decent jobs for the kind of work I was doing at that time which allowed a reasonable amount of family time by not be on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, were scarce.  One of the jobs I applied for was at a facility (I won’t tell you where or mention the name, don’t ask, don’t guess, infer in private if you like but please keep it to yourself) that housed women and a limited number of transitional housing for women with their families. The initial interviewed was off site. Next, since they were seriously considering hiring me, the second “interview” was (as I understood it) an onsite facility tour (which was intentionally limited, you’ll understand why later) and a brief introduction to subordinates, and a followup discussion with the Executive Director.  But to my surprise, there was an unexpected sit down meeting in a board room with a couple of board members, the Executive Director, a couple of social workers, and someone I guessed was a psychologist after the discussion began; after growing up with a psychologist as a mother, I remember thinking that this chat should be “fun”.  Note: I found out later the person was indeed a psychologist that they regularly consulted with.

Everything was going well in the meeting until they began to tell me what I was walking into if I chose to take the job and, at that time, it appeared that they weren’t holding anything back. I was told that the previous person in the position had been relieved of the position due to financial improprieties that caused problems with the both the facility and the building population, then they topped that off by informing me that a good percentage of the population had been abused in the past and some had continuing psychological problems. That’s when I turned the meeting into me interviewing them.  It appeared that I asked all the right questions because when I was done they asked for a few private minutes and then they offered me the job; based on my interview of them, and my current need, I accepted the position on the spot.  After that discussion, I can still remember wondering what my first day on the job was going to be like.

Even after their openness and my subsequent interviewing of them in that board room meeting, I really had no idea what I was actually walking into until the first day on the job where I was taken to introduce to the population in segments.  Now I had grown up facing various kinds of bigotry, some of which was actually pretty bad, but this was an entirely new experience in bigotry; women, many with visible hate in their eyes, were yelling and screaming at me and the ED and social workers with me did nothing to stop it. My thoughts at the time were, what the hell was going on? The hate was obviously eating these women alive and the social workers were just standing there allowing this to continue. This happened with most of the segments, at one moment I considered just walking out the door and never coming back but food and housing were good motivators. Most of you will never know what it’s like to be introduced to multiple groups of women all acting very much like a pack of hive minded snarling wolves because 1) you are a man and 2) you are a man that took the position that was previously occupied by a woman that most of them liked.  Yup, it completely slipped their minds to tell me that little detail in the meeting and how I was going to face down hive minded mobs of anti-man hate, back then I just called it a mob. Well I wrote that it was a fun experience and then it was followed up by another fun discussion with the Executive Director (ED) about not effectively preparing me for what I was going to face or putting a stop to what actually happened.

I wrote back then;

“They said that some of the people had continuing psychological problems, hell from what I saw they’re all consumed with psychological problems!”

“They are literally enabling the behavior I saw from these people!”

“Was this really the kind of support I could expect from the staff?”

“What the hell did I get myself into?”

The first two weeks on the job were absolutely terrible. For many job related reasons I got very little sleep that first two weeks and I was bringing my job frustrations home with me which was something I really didn’t want to do any more after my previous jobs. The visceral hate these women were sharing both in language and some would literally throw things at me was so foreign to me that I questioned what I was doing to cause this. When I raised the issues I was facing with the ED and the social worker staff that was supposed to be my coworkers, what I got back was shifting of the blame and rationalizations. When I read through the things they said to me back then it was like reading though Jack’s list of rationalizations, on e after another after another. I wrote that I feel as if I was put there to be their punching bag. I learned real fast that they were only there to protect the resident women from evil men, it was clear that I was alone with this one.

In two loooooong weeks, this job was infecting me in a bad way and that was negatively affecting my family which I really didn’t need at that time. At the end of those two weeks, I had to make a serious decision, do I just suck it up and stay, or do I resign; well folks, food and housing for family is a damn good motivator and McDonald’s pay is shit, I stayed. I knew something had to be done and it had to be done fast. I did start looking at the job listings in the newspaper again but I continued to trudge forward.

Luckily I had someone outside the family to go to for personal help, the psychologist that had helped me when I was going through my divorce a handful of years before.  This very wise and influential person told me again that “if you want real changes in your life, the change must begin in you”, which is really a personal challenge to look inward first to change yourself to solve problems you face. Well as I always do, I dove in head first, committed to giving this job my best shot for six months, and put this concept to the test.

Aside: After wading through all my saved writings to find what I knew was there I got thinking that maybe some day I should take the advice of my old college creative writing teacher and become a writer after I fully retire.

After a meeting with that psychologist again here is what I wrote to myself,

The Change I Want: Change my work environment to make it tolerable.

The Challenge: Change how I deal with the anti-male hate, prove to them that they are wrong about me, and hopefully that awareness will change their attitudes towards men in general.

I questioned how the hell was I going to accomplish that kind of a tall order?  I had learned about enabling behavior when I lived with a drinking alcoholic and I flat refused to enable the behavior I saw from the women at work.

Here is what I wrote to share with the Executive Director, the social workers, and subsequently posted in all the common areas of the facility that were used by everyone literally every day.

These are my promises to everyone in this facility.

1. I will not tolerate being judged based on anything but my own actions.

2. I will not tolerate bigotry from anyone.

3. I will call bigotry what it is, to its face, when I am confronted with it regardless of who it is.

4. I will not tolerate abusive behavior from anyone under any circumstances.

5. I will not accept rationalizations to justify bad behavior.

6. I will do what I say I am going to do.

7. I will be honest with everyone.

8. I will apologize when I’m wrong.

9. I will listen to others and I expect others to listen to me.

10. I will treat everyone with respect and I expect others to treat me with respect.

If I don’t keep any of these promises, let me know.

I signed it, I posted it, and I kept my word to the letter.

There were days that I wanted to walk out the door. I wrote about standing outside in the freezing cold snow and rain without a coat to cool my fires of anger a few times, but I made a personal commitment to stick with it for 6 months and dammit I was going to stick to it.

It’s real clear now that what happened during that time frame permanently changed me; it helped make me the man I am today. What was important to me at the time was that in six months time I witnessed what appeared to be some big changes for some of the people I worked with and in addition there were some big changes for some the residents, the rest of the people there simply learned (some learned the hard way) where my line was and chose not to cross it anymore, at least for the most part.  I chose to stick with that job for about another year or so, I accomplished a lot there, then I chose another career path that put me on a path to college – that was new to me too.  I’d call it a successful early mid-life crisis.

Back to what happened yesterday.

I don’t think I’ve thought anything about that job or what happened there for more than a moment or two in the many years since I left until I read Jack’s blog and then it was a huge wave of flashbacks and a very overwhelming feeling like I’ve never felt before. My first reaction was Holy Shit!  If that was a version of what our military personnel, some of whom are really good friends of mine, feel when their PTSD kicks in, I’ve now got a brand new awareness and respect of its effects – it ain’t pretty folks.  Holy Shit really is an understatement.

Now to bring this back full circle to what Jack’s blog was about.

What this puts in the forefront of my mind is how the terrible, hateful, bigoted, anti-male attitudes that I faced in that very contained facility were not main stream socially accepted attitudes back then, but now I’m seeing the same kinds of attitudes not only becoming socially acceptable but socially expected and if you don’t share their attitudes and feelings then you’re smeared as being the evil they hate and moreover they simply hate you because you are a man and somehow that’s acceptable. The extreme feminist anti-male attitudes we are seeing now are right inline with what I saw in the past, they are not only destructive to those they target with their hate but it’s also psychologically self-destructive, I’ve seen it first hand. These extreme attitudes may still seem to be relatively limited in their scope but all things extreme are becoming much more mainstream acceptable in our society and that is really, really bad.  This self-destructive bigotry and hate can be seen and heard throughout our society, it’s infecting everything!  We have some real psychological problems in our society and I’m not too sure these psychological issues are fixable by people standing on firm logical ground and saying I’m not going to take it anymore!

All choices have consequences, period.  The choice of some extreme feminist to resort to the kind of bigotry and hate they are exhibiting will totally consume them and those around them.

The choices of the hateful bigoted people in today’s society are more than self-destructive they’re becoming so common that they are being perceived as “normal” but they will destroy us one piece at a time.

Rant complete.

I still might go talk to someone at some point in time, but for now I’m at peace.

Peace my friends.
Zoltar

EDIT:  Found a couple of typos.