Today I'm going to write about crazy people. I want to preface this by saying no one reading this who knows me need worry, I promise I'm not writing about you or any one specific person. (I run with a crazy crowd you understand, so a disclaimer is needed.) But there's been a lot of crazy in my life and the lives of those around me, and a question asked by a friend keeps coming back into my mind as I try to read up on the history of rhetoric. Why do we care? When someone vomits insanity all over you, why does it bother you, no matter how little you think of the person or what they say?

When this question of caring was first put forth, I answered sarcastically I think. Perhaps offered something like "crazy hurts." As the question was bandied about more I moved into a belief that some sort of emotional response is inevitable--when someone is horrible to you, regardless of how little the surrounding circumstances matter--you care, at least for a minute. But now I find even that answer isn't enough. My strongest emotion would be frustration. It is frustrating to listen to someone call you all manner of names, to accuse your character of lacking, to label you a bad human being, and know that you can't argue back. If you say anything a fight ensues, which is what they are after, and if you don't say anything it feels like you're conceding the match. But even if you do respond and avoid a fight, they will never understand reality. Cause they crazy.

No one told me "taking the high road" meant I would have to scale friggin' Everest. Stupid.

After frustration, and fueled in part by the frustration, is anger. These are the two most common emotions in any situation like this. Angry that negativity exists in my life. Angry that I have to choose not to fight back. Angry that I'm angry. I can assess these two emotions easily--they're right there on the surface. But recognizing all of this still doesn't answer the question, why do I care? When someone I don't respect and don't want to interact with offers up hate and negativity, why am I unable to avoid being upset?

I'm discussing it because I can't help but feel like there's value in this line of thought. Almost as if I could discover why particular interactions affect me then I could control my thoughts, my emotions, and my person throughout the experience of these interactions. It's easy when dealing with something as unpleasant as a bunny boiler (see Glenn Close's character in Fatal Instinct) to let the anger override all other aspects of humanity. It's easy to hate. I've never been one to hate and that, I think, is what is bothering me the most. When I meet people who are mean, manipulative, and hurtful, if I have enough dealings with them, I first resent them, then begin to hate them. I don't want to hate them.

Ah, and perhaps we come to the crux of it. I'm upset because I'm full of hate and, being unable to recognize that emotion, all I can process is upset and unhappiness which leaves me asking why. All the while everything inside me rails against the hate because I don't like to hate (you could even say I hate to hate, ha ha...ha ha) and the scenario replays over and over in mind with me trying to come to terms with why I am upset. And isn't that interesting? My upset, therefore, has nothing to do with the person inflicting the crazy on me, and everything to do with me. How delightfully selfish, but also honest. Not caring or respecting them it doesn't make sense for me to care what they say, but spending every moment of every day trying to be a person that doesn't feel anger, hate, or resentment when I can help it, their causal of those emotions inside me produces and emotional thunderstorm.

I am upset because the crazy has made me feel something I don't want to feel and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Oh that's worse than Ann Coulter discussing social policy.

There is still the question of course, why do I feel anything to begin with and I don't have a complex answer for that one. Perhaps I am unable not to feel bad when being accused of being a bad person? Perhaps because I have spent so much time trying to be the best person I can be? That, of course, means nothing in crazy town, therefore, it only makes sense that the accusations would run along those lines. This is a similar feeling to the one I get when confronted with people who are racist or misogynistic. People that hate a particular ethnicity or women, just because. They have arguments and those arguments usually bandy about some idea of truth, mutated past all recognition to lend credibility, but there is no point in arguing back. When I hear people preaching hate I react in almost the same way.

So, we know it bothers me because it makes me a more hateful version of itself. And now we know why I react in the first place; because people that spew hate mutate truth and attempt to marginalize those around them by cutting them down. It doesn't matter whether they are successful in that attempt or not. It doesn't matter that they are wrong and, in this instance, crazy. It is maddening because as a receiver of the rhetoric I am faced with blatant untruth and left completely immobilized. My existence in their mind is set, and nothing I ever do will change that. That is what upsets me, even as I recognize the inevitability and even, in the long run, harmlessness of it.

Perhaps this could evolve into my own essay on language as violence--people have written about it and I thought I understood, but maybe only now am I realizing that language can cause violence. After all, when you're stabbed it doesn't matter whether you respect the person stabbing you or not, you're still stabbed. Interesting.