An indulgent thread:

I have known a handful of people in my life that I would characterize as truly strong & confident. The signal characteristic of such people is that they are at peace with themselves & thus direct their attention outward, at the world.

People who are insecure, self-loathing, or neurotic - who feel less like a coherent person than a jumble of person parts that don't fit together - spend a lot of time looking inward, preoccupied w/ what others think of them in part bc they're trying to figure themselves out.

I knew/dated this woman Cherise, back when I lived in Missoula, 1997ish. She had been kicked out of her house when she was 13, had a kid when she was 16 in juvie, got a job bagging groceries, scrabbled up from nothing w/ nobody's help.

If anyone had earned a right to have a chip on her shoulder, it was her. But she was just a force of nature, always drawing people out, *seeing* people, doing things for people, utterly engaged in the world. She attracted friends & moments & coincidences, everywhere she went.

Things would just happen, to her, for her, around her. She was the strongest & most confident person I ever knew & because of it she was able to fully live in the world. I was entranced & mystified & eventually felt totally inadequate, since I lived in my head 95% of the time.

Anyway, I feel like there used to be a version of masculinity in US culture built around this kind of strength. A man who is confident in himself & thus able to be a steady & reliable support for others, able to engage others with a generous spirit. A gentleman, I guess?

But the masculinity that seems to dominate today -- hamburgers, pickup trucks, guns, belligerence & dominance, constant desperate signaling -- is the opposite. These are people so desperate for affirmation that they can barely see the world at all.

It's weird that it needs saying, but strong people don't spend all their live-long days telling people how strong they are. They don't force themselves onto people, demanding acknowledgement of their strength. They don't measure their strength by who they can "own."

Here we come to Trump, of course, who is the opposite of Cherise. He lives 100% in his own head, in a tiny cave, seeing only a mirror, knowing the world only through how it makes him feel about himself, whether it feeds his bottomless need for affirmation & ego reinforcement.

Trump ceaselessly tries to tell everyone how strong he is. He demands tributes to his strength. He wards of his gnawing insecurity with acts of cruelty & dominance, which he mistakes for strength. Without continuous external reinforcement, his ego, his sense of self, crumbles.

He is, in every way, weak. The people all over US culture these days rolling coal & carrying assault rifles into grocery stores & cheering as protesters are beat & telling you that emojis are girly are signaling, in the clearest way possible, their fear & weakness.

The point of this thread, to summarize I guess, is that strong, confident, self-possessed people tend to be kind & care about other people. Assholes are assholes because they're weak & frightened. </fin>