THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

MDERPELDING | 2006-07-17

mderpelding says:

Wow, you actually want to be at fault for our present situation?

Who made you God?

I was born into a lower class Republican family.

You know, authority is allways right.

In the upper midwest.

It took me years to overcome the crap programmed into my head.

I still am trying desperately to think for myself.

FOR A CHANGE.

What has happened to us as a people ANYWHERE is not the failings of a few "enlightened"

individuals.

You don't have a monopoly on bitterness, or regret.

Neither do I.

So wah for me, and wah for you.

Comment by mderpelding —

MY REPLY:

If you weren't into Bob's Blog, you couldn't recognize this as a commenter's version of a compliment. underpelding was presumably not in the recovery program, but he has common sense, which is the same thing. When you are in that position, you try desperately to save people.

If you are a sponsor and so forth and you trry desperately to keep people from falling back on drugs, and they destroy themselves anyway, you blame yourself.

At first.

Then someone points out to you that you are not the God you think you are. Get off the self-punishment, Bob. Not because it is good for you to get off the self-punishment, but because the self-punishment is, forgive me, Joe, SILLY.

mderpelding says that me and Joe cannot bear responsibility for what happened.

But if I had nothing to add to this, it wouldn't be Bob's Blog. I am NOT saying that I take responsibility for THEIR failure, THEIR cowardice, THEIR pretenses. I am NOT saying that there is Great Responsbibility here that only a True Philosopher could Truly Understand. I AM saying that it is time that we called silly asses silly asses and went on.

Bless you miderpelding, but I am not inside the moral dilemna you are trying to free me from.

Someone needs to keep repeating silly and trying to be sophisticated because it is the truth. I do NOT feel guilty. I feel BORED. I feel that I have listened to this crap for fifty years, and I am TIRED of it. Your attempt to make me feel better is appreciated, but misdirected.

And the bottom line is that you are pushing the same line Joe is, the neoconservative line, the respectable conservative line. The silly people ant to talk about how i feel, they want to consult the dictionary, they want to talk about guilt complex and factual complexity as a philosophical concept.

I say they are silly asses who cover themselves with "sophistication." I say that everybody who tries to deflect attention to Bob's Guilt complexes or dictionary definitions is their ally.

We could get off the point by discussing whether you MEANT to do that.

I won't do that. You are doing something bad. Joe is doing something bad.

Back to the reality we are dealing iwth.

COMMENTS (1)

#1 joe rorke | 2006-07-18 15:14

Not Spam. A sponsor's first responsibility is to lead a pigeon through the 12 Steps. It is not the sponsor's responsibility to prevent the pigeon from falling down. If they fall and you blame yourself you are not fit to be a sponsor. That, by the way, is not an unusual occurrence. There's a lot of sponsors who don't know what their job is and it shows.

Yes, you're still going to use "silly" and "sophisticated" excessively because you are not one to accept correction.

That piece you just wrote, by the way, didn't make a damn bit of sense to me. I mean the whole piece. I'm not talking about the stupid nonsense about me being a neoconservative. That's taken as a joke. That's all it could be. Mderpelding wasn't giving you a compliment, Bob. He was slapping your face as I read it. When somebody says, "who made you God?" that's not a compliment. That's a challenge. No, don't send me any money. The lesson is free.