Everything Is So F*cking Expensive

I don’t know if it helps, but you’ve opened my eyes to a few things, to the point that at least I understand how awful your situation is. And you’re right, I’m not much better, mostly I feel like I’m just domesticated. If I get as frustrated and angry as you get…. I’d break. I know, because it’s happened.

You know who’s supposed to help? Adult Welfare. I talked to them a couple times when I was in child welfare and it was supposedly their mission to prevent abuse and neglect of vulnerable adults. Most of it was calling about care homes, god awful stuff that happens in those.

But adult welfare didn’t have even a third of child welfare’s funding. No overtime, a friend of mine working there was laid off during the pandemic, you know when abuse situations got worse.

I thought about transferring over, but I never had that kind of time and hope. Being that it would be the same ultimate boss, head of public health for the state, and where I’m at that particular idiot doesn’t care about any of the people under his charge….. I couldn’t take care of myself when I wasn’t allowed to care for others.

It still irks me, the mismatch. As if adult abuse occurs in a vacuum and isn’t part of the systemic problems in our society…. Therapist I talked to today said I might still be able to make a run at changing things, and I don’t feel a thing. It hurt too much to want, it was too expensive.

Exactly that, positive thinking doesn’t correct systemic injustice. You can’t happy thoughts or cope to dealing with ongoing trauma.

In that way groups such as ours suffer from the same flaws as the rest of mental health; we’re a group that is well aware of the deficiencies around us, however we are the least empowered to change it.

I still like my idea of stringing up a few of these well connected rich jerks. A few of them, public executions…. they’re always telling us how the death penalty is such a deterrent, I’d like to see how they feel under the same constraints. I can almost entirely assure you, a few really brutal public examples…. worked in France… sort of…

That’s what I’m losing myself in today, so happens. I’m fascinated by the machinations of the Holy Roman Empire, which controlled all of Europe at one point. Here’s my favorite cool fact; when all the princes of all the subservient kingdoms met, it was called an Imperial Diet. It was really informal at first, but eventually it became somewhat of a ruling body.

Also! If you were one of the members of that body, chances are that the only person you reported to was the emperor. Which meant significant power, and sometimes restricted to a city that managed to get protection. Napoleon made it all fall apart, and he himself was a direct result of the French revolution, which wouldn’t have been necessary if the HRE had held France better in check….

and why that fowled up, was the reformation. You go far enough in any direction, looking into any horrible events of history, and there’s Christianity. At the end of the thirty years war (the bloodiest war in Europe until WW1), the HRE had to agree to terms which limited the power of the emperor, and made it harder for the HRE to interfere with France.

Apparently the only thing that the French and HRE agreed on was that they hated Calvinists……. and that’s a doctrinal story for another day. So they let them have the Netherlands, which was under the control of Spain up to that point.

If I could live anywhere in Europe, it’d be Netherlands. Not for the drugs, I can get that here. For the culture though, their culture is just so gosh darn happy. They work 32 hours a week, and go on vacation a month every year. I might be able to function under that kind of system.