No, I Didn't Hear Your Imaginary Apology

Allow me to make something easier for you to understand, without going into too much detail. If you want to apologize to me for something, asking me to read your mind and accept your apology telepathically is unreasonable. Yes, I knew you were thinking about it, and I noticed the change in your behavior. Still, your vicious rumor campaign against me, your attempts at shaming anyone who became friends with me after I married Keith, and your outrageous lies demand an amend, rather than a flimsy apology. Words, in this case, are empty. I will not believe you are truly sorry until you approach every single person to whom you've slandered me and tell them that you were simply trying to hurt someone you didn't actually know, and explain that you did not have a reason for all the nasty things you said. Short of that, the gesture you didn't make, but which you thought I should take for granted, means nothing.

An amend, in this case, is going to be difficult for you or your ilk to make. Can you give back everything you've taken? Can you fix what you broke? Probably not, but I still would have been more inclined to respect you if you had, at least, spoken up, and not expected me to read your behavioral cues or your mind. Whether or not I actually can read your mind is beside the point. At the very least, you owe me an explanation for the things you said and did. Your outrage at finding your picture in my "troll gadget" is amusing, but if you had treated me with respect, I might have considered removing your picture. Why are you so concerned about it, anyways? You wanted to hurt my feelings and piss me off, and you succeeded. Since I felt that there was a "debt" of sorts, that needed to be paid, and you acted like a troll toward me on another person's Facebook page, I went ahead and took a picture of you out of the public domain for the list of trolls. Aren't you happy that you succeeded in making me sad? Wasn't that your intention? The fact that I noticed your efforts should make you feel that you accomplished your goal!

As for your dramatic performance, the one in which you went from person to person, complaining about how rotten I am, because I didn't accept your imaginary apology or believe you had changed because you learned how to feign some fake manners; I only have one comment: where's the eye rolley when I need it? Let me reiterate what I told you in person; I am not a God or a Goddess, that I might forgive you. Nor is it within my powers to balance your Karma.

My Latest Troll

Not too long ago, someone asked me to whom the newest face on my "troll gadget", to the right, belongs. I looked at it, and realized that the latest addition is the face of a woman who lives in the same geographic area where I live, a postage stamp sized little town in Northeast Kansas, but unlike yours truly, she has lived here all of her life, and never leaves this town unless she experiences dire need to do so.  She amuses herself by bullying anyone she perceives as culturally different from herself, and she enhances her harassment efforts on Facebook and in person by engaging any and all who might enjoy mocking and threatening people they don't personally know, and these adults have all worked very hard to cause as much injury and unhappiness as possible to yours truly and and make my children miserable in school. My children were told by their children that the harassment would stop if they converted to christianity, and the faces of three or four trolls who have been involved in this are featured on that slideshow.

But what would make adults, in their fifties, act like fifth graders? Lets see: as nearly as I can tell, they do not like the fact that I married someone who lived here, already. They had no problem with my husband living here, but when I married him and we bought a house, they became nasty. The teachers at the school got angry because I insisted that my children, stepchildren, and an adopted child, get the same opportunities in school as all the other children. I insisted that the bullying stop. I got the ACLU to make them stop telling my children that they had to go to church. I became vocal both inside and outside the community when it came to my attention that children sometimes come up missing during the day at school, and there are no protocols to ensure that the children who are unaccounted for, after school events, are found. Because I reacted that way to the school, members of the local Catholic Church decided that they should protect their community by spreading as many unkind rumors about me as they could. They did not care what this would do to my children, my family, or my marriage; they just did it. It left me feeling very, very lucky that my family of origin is not christian. When my physician ordered me to take time away from work, the newest troll, and several of her teacher friends, harangued my children almost daily at school about how lazy their mother must be.......a couple of my children tried explaining life with severe anemia, (hemoglobin usually 6.5, hematocrit usually between 18 and 20, prior to diagnosis of the type of anemia) but one of them was insensitive enough to tell one of my daughters that "people like her mother" do not deserve blood transfusions"! So it appears that the impetus that makes an adult act like a fifth grade bully is the desire to pick on someone who does not attend his or her church, is more intellectually inclined than the bully, and is physically not as strong as the bully. And maybe Jesus factors in somewhere, too; but I am not sure exactly how. The trolls justify their crap to their own children by reiterating that Jesus hates people like me, and I can only look at the privileges I have enjoyed and the people I have loved over the course of my life and conclude that there is no such evil genie as Jesus, who hates my guts, as these people say. My trolls are not only immature, they are delusional.

Now let me address some of the concerns dwelt upon by the trolls in question. The newest one appears to think what she's told to think by her priest at the Catholic church and her small town neighbors. She's under no moral obligation to behave morally, because she can just go to confession. It doesn't matter if she drives drunk, or hurts someone doing the same....all she has to do is confess and try harder to conform. When conformity demands that she harm another, in order to make the christians at her church feel all warm and fuzzy, her priest tells her that it is good to hurt the families of those who are not christian. (Yes, he told me this; it was about an assault, though, not about a run-of-the-mill bully) After I got sick of her, and especially sick of trying to make friends with her and her ilk, I simply saved some of the more amazing examples of their bullying, electronic communiques and added their pictures to the "troll gadget" I created. Her dealio is that I criticize people who live in "her" town, and she and her little friends think that they should tell me not to live here, after buying a home and marrying. So does Mr. Catholic Priest. But the truth is, according to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the United States grants me the right to live anywhere within it's borders that I damned well please, and I can bring my heritage, my culture, my complexion (if that's actually a problem for these morons) and my religion with me. I am under no obligation to be anything like these drunk religitards. I am also entitled to a public school that does not proselytize. There is no problem with their religion, either, but just as I ask my cat to excrete in the litter box, I ask them to excrete expressions of their religion privately, too. This brings me to the concern of a couple of the other trolls.....indeed; they are very, very concerned that I expect them to obey the law. My religion never should have mattered to them, and I actually don't think it does. They have some very valid reasons for not wanting to get to know anyone new, and those reasons have a lot more to do with THEM than with anyone who might move here. But why bring religion into it? Can't they stand on their own two feet without an imaginary accomplice?