“Hey, let’s beat up the victim”
by Mira and Charles on May 7th, 2009They’re at it again, and I know why. Elizabeth Edwards, whose husband, former Senator and Presidential candidate John Edwards cheated on her while she was suffering from cancer, is getting yelled at by snarky and clueless folks ranging from Maureen Dowd in the New York Times to Kathleen Parker in The Daily Beast. Her “crime” seems to be that she somehow provoked her own betrayal (“She was asking for it”: you know, like rape victims!), that she didn’t walk out on him (all her accusers are convinced they they would be much stronger than poor stupid Elizabeth), and that she has been talking about what happened in public (“Doesn’t she have the decency to hide in shame like a proper cheated-on woman?”).
Why this orgy of beating up on a victim of betrayal? The reason is surprisingly simple. If you discover that a friend of yours has been cheated on, it’s scary. “If that could happen to her, it could happen to me.” But if this happens to someone in the public eye, someone attractive and accomplished, it’s much scarier. “If that could happen to someone like that, with all she has going for her, it could easily happen to me.”
And we don’t want to think that. So what we do is find ourselves drawn to making up a story about how this person who was victimized is somehow deserving of what happened. She has somehow brought it on herself. She is somehow uppity, prideful, a person needing to be cut down to size.
She is, in other words, other, not a nice, normal, good-hearted person like me. She wasn’t a good person, because as we all know bad things never happen to good people. And then, whew!, we’re comforted. We’re safe. We’re not like that bad Elizabeth Edwards. So we’re safe. No one would cheat on a nice person like me.
Attacking the victim is really a form of magical thinking that goes back thousands of years. If we can demonize her, and then sacrifice her, we will somehow be safer.
So we think. And of course we’re wrong. Perfectly lovely women still get cheated on, people who don’t let a bite of unhealthy food pass their lips still get cancer, and lots of folks who work hard and play by the rules still find they’ve gotten laid off. Bad things do happen to good people. All the magical thinking in the world can’t protect us from that.
It can, however, make us much more vulnerable. When we attack the victim, we attack the fabric of our own lives. Everyone who has been hurt, betrayed, abandoned, felled by a stroke of misfortune deserves to be embraced, not blamed, loved, not judged, understood, not rejected. Our job is to create the world we want to live in by acting the way we want others to act.
Attacking the victim will not make us feel safe. Only by offering our support and sympathy to people like Elizabeth Edwards can we create a safety net in our own lives that will hold us safe on the day, and it is not impossible that that day will come, when we ourselves fall through no fault of our own. Then, God willing, there will be people who will hold us and help us and who will, in the process, heal the world.
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If you want to really understand what affairs are all about, you should check out When Good People Have Affairs. There’s a lot of insight and help there. And since bad things do happen to good people, and if you’re one of those good people you have to find a way to heal, you will want to check out Everything Happens for a Reason to discover a way to find meaning and hope and redemption in what has happened to you.
And then let’s all take really good care of each other.
What are your thoughts about all this? Let us know. We’d like to hear, and so would many others.
Love, Mira and Charles
