Enabling

It is easy to get sucked into enabling dysfunctional behavior in others if you are prone to be concerned for your fellow human beings. However, practice isn't about doing what is easy. I have had to struggle with enabling during my entire adult life. I made my living for many years as a registered nurse working with very dysfunctional human beings. It was always difficult to turn off my clinician personality and turn on my self-preserving instincts outside of work. I was conditioned to most immediately tolerate more dysfunction in people than most. The result was a maddening level of dysfunction in my personal life at times. I look at the world today and see America enabling dysfunction everywhere and also enabling Fascism within. Muslims bomb us, burn our embassies, riot violently over cartoons, yet we insist that we are going to bring democracy to them, as though it were the new gospel in this 21st century crusade. We throw our tax dollars into their pockets to help our greedy corporations negotiate sweet deals for natural resources. We also enable our greedy corporations and their shareholders with huge tax breaks and a failed legal immigration policy which allows a flow of near-slave labor. The enabler is also dysfunctional. Violence and criminality should be met with distance, vigilance, self defensive strength at the ready and, most important of all, very little reactive attention.