Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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March 31, 2023
Can TiR help you? “’Help’? What's that supposed to mean? Do you think that we need need your pity? Your charity? Your handouts? What an insult. Get lost.” "Just who do you think you are, asking me that? You know nothing about me, my needs or my situation. What do you think qualifies you to help me? To presume to diagnose if I need help or not? I don't need your intervention. I don't need anybody to judge my life, least of all the likes of whom you appear to be." "What exactly motivates you to ask that question? Guilt? Condescension? What a back-handed putdown. Though you're too smug and self-satisfied to see it, aren't you?" "So that you can play the savior-hero? Inevitably at my expense? Forget it." “Nice try. What’s your ‘real’ agenda?” "'Help,' yeah right. I know humans all too well. What masquerades with them as so-called altruism is just a disguised form of self-interest, and greed in camouflage. What's in it for you?"
“What’s the hidden price tag? You’ll assure me beforehand that your help is offered ‘for free.’ Then afterward I bet you’ll send me a billing invoice to demand payment. I can see those tricks coming a mile away.” "TiR will help, then turn around and say, 'Now you owe me! After all TiR did you for you!" We'd never be rid of you. So take a hike." “So that afterwards you can lord it over me and gloat about how I could not have done it without you? Stay the heck away.” "I've pushed this boulder 99% of the way up the mountain - alone. Now you want to swoop in and 'help' me push it up the last few inches? Then you'll try to take all the credit. And the rewards. Like the whole accomplishment was in fact entirely yours. You must think I'm a sucker." “Not when you ask it like that you can’t. In fact, if you genuinely wanted to help me, you wouldn’t even have to ask. You would simply have done it. The whole question-asking pose is a dead giveaway that you're simply being performative, and signaling. What a hypocrite!” "No one ever asks to help me. That's just how people are. So I am very suspicious of why someone would ask to help me now. In effect you are asking me to drop my guard. I am wary of everyone. “Thanks but no thanks. You probably would help wrongly and screw things up for me even worse than they are.” "Thanks but no thanks. You might help me successfully. But if you did, with no strings attached and it was a positive experience, then this would only raise hope in me. The hope would be the possibility that kind, generous, real, reliable, non-manipulative allies exist. Inevitably that hope would be dashed, as it always is in this cruel and stupid world. I would be left even more hurt, miserable and bereft than I already am." "Let's please not go down that road. If you helped me, then I'd feel indebted to return the favor, or to thank you by helping you with something in return. Or you might ask nothing for yourself but suggest that I go give help to some other, third, needier party. Then I would end up forcing that person to feel indebted to me and to reciprocate. Then I'd in turn feel compelled to respond, and we'd all get further bound up in each others' lives, et cetera, et cetera. The etiquette of it all would become dizzying. Something eventually would have to break, I can tell. Where would it end?" "No. I would rather that each of us continue to carry our burdens separately, in isolation, overwhelm and terror. Let's stick with the Devil we know." “Now? After all this time? Could you not see that I needed help earlier? My needs are so obvious that only an idiot could not see them. Only a liar could claim not to see them by asking a lame question like 'Can TiR help you?' There is no possible, good faith reason imaginable to me to explain why it took you so long to ask. Therefore to accept your help now would be like to pretend that you get a free pass on previously being so clueless and oblivious. What lesson would you learn if I accepted your help? None. So don’t bother.” “OK OK. Yes. TiR can help me. But I am not going to say how, when, where, or why I need help, or if I even need help at all on anything. I might not even know myself. But If TiR really cared to help, TiR would know what to do regardless. So maybe this is a test. If you try to help me and fail to get it right, it will show me how wrong, dishonest and dangerous you were in the first place. I will never forget it or forgive you. I might add you to my list of enemies. I might devote myself to making every moment of your life as miserable as possible. You might worry that I will make you my repository of catharsis for all the betrayals and letdowns that I have suffered in the past. In a way, you can even see how on some level this would be justified." "Still interested in 'helping' me?” . . . in an age of contagious
mistrust and rampant collective paranoia? |
