Thread by @Nick_Carmody

Some thoughts on the Sandy Hook father, Jeremy Richman, who committed suicide, and the potential interplay to the political climate (thread): 1/
thedailybeast.com/the-word-that-…

For over five years, the Sandy Hook parents not only had to suffer the excruciating pain of losing a child to mass murder, but they simultaneously had to listen to bought and paid for politicians defend the means by which their child was taken from them. 2/

Worse, they listened to sociopathic narcissists (Alex Jones) spread pathological dishonesty, fake news, alternative facts, & revisionist histories to the point of being accused of being crisis actors that staged an event that took away their children....3/
time.com/5243124/sandy-…

The trauma of having a child taken from you in this manner is severe & debilitating. But having to then endure accusations that not only dismiss the parents’ loss & grief, but also demonize them by accusing them of engaging in something that never happened (crisis acting)….4/

…simply because it promoted the profile & standing of a sociopathic narcissist within the extreme far Right’s political ecosystem….. is beyond comprehension. These parents were inhumanely and shamelessly victimized twice….5/

Some of these parents are reported to have been forced to move/relocate as many as seven times because of the harassment they received from sociopathic narcissists & their disciples…6/ forward.com/fast-forward/4…

Moving is stressful under any circumstance. But imagine having lost a child &
going through this process over & over, having to deal with all the financial headaches, taking losses on property/paying realtor fees….all while grieving & being lied about, harassed, & threatened..7/

Imagine being attacked by people who say your experience and your grief isn’t real, and didn’t happen. Imagine the narrative being that your child either didn’t exist, or didn’t die…..all while trying to come to grips with the fact that you will never see her/him again….8/

Now imagine having all of these experiences/feelings/traumas triggered hundreds of times over the last 6+ years, as Jeremy Richman stated, every time a school shooting occurred….9/

Imagine how severely triggered you would feel every time you saw yet another parent, who is just minutes into your 6+ years of Hell, as they suddenly learn their little angel was also taken from them….10/

Imagine the cautious optimism felt when observing the Parkland kids take action in an attempt to derive meaning and purpose from their loss and grief, and feeling like *THIS* time it was different…..11/

https://twitter.com/Nick_Carmody/status/1101840068732317696

Imagine the frustration and deflation after observing the constant lack of political will/courage/action in the year since Parkland…..12/

Then imagine the heartbreaking experience of hearing about Parkland school shooting survivors taking their own life due to the ongoing overwhelming trauma they continue to experience….13
washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03…

Now imagine hearing, on top of everything else, that the sociopathic narcissist who has spent years propagating pathological dishonesty, alternative facts, fake news, endorsing Alex Jones, and defending the NRA…..14
cnn.com/2015/12/02/pol…

….suddenly appears, like so many others like him, to have evaded accountability for egregious, criminal, unconstitutional, and/or immoral conduct that causes great pain and suffering…..15/

https://twitter.com/Nick_Carmody/status/1105795583636168705

It’s still TBD what happens in the political arena, & we don’t know exactly what triggered Jeremy Richman, and pushed him to this point. But as others who have struggled similarly may confirm, based on my own experiences (w/brain injuries & w/people w/Trump-like disorders),…16/

…once you get to that dark of a place, just hearing about other people taking their own lives, triggers a very dark, relapse-like feeling, where you almost relive your own darkness when hearing the news of someone else not making it out of their own darkness….17/

So much so that, in the past, when I wasn’t that far out/removed from my lowest point, and when my recovery was considerably more fragile, just hearing the news of someone taking their life felt like it caused a regression in my recovery…18/

Again, we don’t know what Jeremy Richman was experiencing. But it’s possible some or all of these things factored in Jeremy Richman losing “hope”.

We can only wish that he is finally at peace…….and, somewhere, his little girl is finally sitting on his lap again…..19

...cont.
After I wrote this thread, I came across this story. Imagine how traumatic it was for the immediate family of Jeremy Richman, as well as his extended Sandy Hook family, who have all been victimized by the school shooting conspiracy accusations.1/ washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03…

Imagine how the thousands of people who were directly affected by the Parkland shooting must have felt when they heard that the NRA and one of Alex Jones' people may have been conspiring to distort the reality of the Parkland shooting...2/

Imagine how the Parkland survivors must have felt to hear that, just like Sandy Hook, far Right political extremists and the NRA were willing to expose them to additional trauma in order promote their agenda, their brand, and to protect their business interests...3/

Imagine the Parkland survivors realizing that some of the same people that exposed the parents of Sandy Hook to threats and harassment, were attempting to do the same to them...4/

Imagine what it felt like for the Parkland survivors to hear that, just like Sandy Hook, people were willing to dismiss the Parkland survivors’ loss and their grief in order to further political and corporate agendas....5/

Now imagine Parkland survivors hearing about the NRA & an Alex Jones associate conspiring against them just days after two Parkland school shooting survivors committed suicide.

We are at pivotal point in history.

Words matter.

Facts matter.

Objective reality matters.

https://twitter.com/Nick_Carmody/status/1118653771624734726

https://twitter.com/Nick_Carmody/status/1118655944148377600

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@threadreaderapp please unroll