Ojibwe Confessions: Indigenous View Point: The Success of Toxic People

Saturday, February 2, 2019

The Success of Toxic People

There is a good chance you are going to have toxic people involved in someway throughout your life.

We meet many individuals throughout our lives; some are cool while others are arseholes. It is the Arsehole encounters which we remember long after. Normally interactions with an arsehole is just a rather ugly experience and it is over. The good thing about arseholes, we can usually recognize them and deal with it. The toxic person is another category. The toxic person can be an arsehole, a prick, a witch, a beauty, a cutie, an Elder, a Leader. The toxic person spreads venom, poison and can get you sick. The aresehole, the bastard on the other hand can be dealt with accordingly. You can just not go to their place of business, their space or you can bannock slap them. (Bannock slap used to be an Indian thing before folks started running to the cops)

The toxic person is dangerous. You can be in the gun sights of a toxic person and not even realize it. At the work place the toxic person can be the sensitive woman, the angry man, the cool person, the older colleague, the young upstart, and the respected. Everything you do is offensive to them and they will use their power to own you. There could the Elder who uses the disguise of being Traditional Spiritual person. They are accorded respect and ranking over regular folk but they could use their standing as a weapon. Words from a Spiritual person is generally adhered to. So an Elder could be mean spirited and hurt you. Gender could be used as a weapon as well by the toxic person. There could be the co-worker who is incompetent but uses toxicity to hide it. The toxic person will use other's to hurt you. The toxic person is cunning. They are dangerous because there is no remorse or empathy towards you. The real poison is that they may actual believe they are not the bad person in the situation. Most of the time a toxic person will beat you. The reason is, you can't fight toxicity. How can you? Toxic tactics are hard to combat. Information is often distorted. Cliques are used as weapons against you. Emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail are often utilized in absence of common sense and facts. Out right lying is part of their arsenal of weapons.

Toxic people have success in hurting others. They climb to positions of power over others. The strength they have is in their dishonesty. They have no qualms of blaming others for all things bad. How do you deal with toxicity? Try to recognize the toxic and how they are different from the regular arsehole.

I was laughing with my daughter the other day about how I am a jerk. Of course I believe I am a very good guy (but still). So when my girl said "Yeah there are lots of people who don't like you." I was like "What? How come? I'm a good guy?" It's funny, we like being jerks but don't like the consequences which come with being a jerk.

I have an old friend who is one of the cruelest people I have ever met in my life. I don't think he knows he is cruel. Of course he is like many of us, capable of doing good things, and being a jerk some time or another. It is like my brother and I in conversation about a sad incident in the Reserve. A cousin of ours had a very tragic thing happen just recently. Her husband was allegedly stealing copper from an old abandoned building in the nearby town from our reserve. Seems the guy (this guy was just a good guy, absolutely nothing arsehole about him) got electrocuted while in the act. His burnt up body was found by local Firefighters. I was on the phone with my brother and told him about the incident. "Wow that is shocking." said my brother. Heck we had a big of a laugh at the expense of this poor man. It makes me think about a friend who said to me "Hey Steve are there any good Courchene's?" He made me laugh because of course there must be. At least I think there are?

That people is the jerk and don't never get it confused with the toxic person.