I’ve had the same two recurring dreams every night for the better part of forty years. I don’t want to know what they mean, or why I have them.
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When I first started to become an investigative researcher, it was just a novelty. I could find information and people using the nascent Internet technology that had piqued my interest in adolescence. I remember the CD-ROM disc that came in the mail, as America Online attempted to enlist the nation’s households in its dial-up dream. The scratchy sound of a modem connecting on my father’s Packard Bell computer, which he had purchased from Montgomery Ward, out of Springdale Mall in Mobile, Alabama.
It was my first escape from home. Later, when I got my license, I would go to the Barnes and Noble on the corner of the same mall and camp out until closing. I’d bring my homework or anything else I had to do with me. When I wasn’t working, I’d be out and about, avoiding a house that had been unpleasant for most of my life. My sisters used to joke that there was a mixup at the hospital; so pronounced were my differences with the rest of my family that it seemed I didn’t fit within the range that would make me part of their dynamic.
Later, I started to ask the most dangerous question one can ask: “Why?:
Why had certain things happened to me at the hands of my parents? Why was it that my father could be gregarious and fun on the one hand and complete wrath on the other?
To some degree, when I branched out of novelty into the two areas that would define me, it was an attempt to understand why people did certain things. I didn’t understand stealing. I only derived true satisfaction from things I earned: the wooden Louisville Slugger I had saved up for that my younger brother coveted, the television and VCR and tv cart I’d bought after my first job at the fried chicken restaurant, the 1985 Chevrolet Celebrity I paid insurance and gas for which afforded me the ability to stay out of my parents’ house as I finished up high school. There were ACT scores and state and regional competitions that led to national competitions.
Later, when the scholarship letter came in which made it clear that I’d be able to go to college, I felt relief. My dad had given me until August to leave after graduation.
I always loved my dad, no matter how much of an asshole he was. No one ever got to me the way that he did, no one ever made me feel feelings the way he did, which was part of why I liked him. My dad made me feel what other people described in their day to day lives, emotional normalcy which would have been otherwise been entirely foreign to me. I thought I was afraid of my dad as a child until I held my own daughter for the first time and knew what fear truly was as the enormity of my responsibility for her and towards her hit me squarely.
Most of my life has been spent in observation of other people as I painfully formulated rules in order to blend in with peers and the world in general. I’ve always been more analytical than emotional, with emotions only arising out of frustration at failure. Maturation is the process of learning to manage and contain your emotions, even if they are limited in range. It was this analytical approach that won out over emotion when I realized that the abuse I had suffered as a six year old was sexual.
I was initially angry. Later, I just wanted to know why.
My abuser was atypical in many respects: female, and not married to a dominant male partner who sexually abused me, outwardly-and convincingly-religious.
I began to analyze every bit of my abuse, the person who abused me, and to observe my abuser. There wasn’t much depth. She’d been abused as a child by at least two perpetrators. Her great grandparents had run a whorehouse. Her older brother, who was one of her abusers, had multiple felony convictions. Her mother was horrifically physically abusive, divorced and married multiple times. If anything, she was a cliché. She was the product of deliberate dysfunction.
My father was someone whose mother had dropped him off with an aunt and uncle in Texas in order to take up with a younger man who didn’t want kids around. His father had been a serial philanderer who left the kids in the station wagon while he went inside his girlfriend’s house to engage in his usual activity. The fact that it was his weekend didn’t matter much. My dad was the product of deliberate dysfunction, the son of parents who chose anything other than their children and who had little connection to and fear of God.
Odi et Amo.
We make choices. As I sit here dealing with the accumulated pain from multiple ailments-a cervical and thoracic spine that are wrecked, kidneys that are no longer working as well as they used to, diabetes and hypertension that have wrecked my kidneys and other organs, neuralgia from last year’s shingles experience-I can only say that there is no why. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, although a choice to bring an umbrella with you might alleviate some of the problem.
I say that there is no why because I made the choice that I would not inflict the same pain and suffering on another human being that had been inflicted upon me. I would not rape or molest, and I wouldn’t beat my child and call it discipline. Much of my life with respect to children has been suggestion; I could look at nieces and nephews and convey more in the way of suggestion than I would ever actually do. It’s only when your nephews become teenage boys that you actually have to do anything in terms of discipline, and then only once or twice.
My nieces and nephews know that they are off limits to the world, and that a simple phone call can resolve their problems with anyone who is inappropriate or threatening. My siblings know the same. They also know that this is not a license to act abusively towards others, because the behavior I despise in others is not anything I want my own blood relatives engaging in. The consequences are severe either way: I hold my own family to a higher standard than others. We know the difference between right and wrong, and the expectation is that we will behave accordingly.
I find it curious that others externalize this to law enforcement. If my son engaged inappropriate conduct, it would reflect on me as a father, and I would deal with it myself. No police officer should have to risk his or her life because I failed as a father. My neighbors shouldn’t have money taken out of their pockets, and food off of their tables, to give my son three hots and a cot for doing wrong. I didn’t have a son; I had a daughter whose personality is such that I don’t worry much about her being a perpetrator, only a victim.
The world is a cruel place for kind people. Genuinely nice guys and girls don’t finish first. Empathy and decency are liabilities. Truth fails, and the people who depart from evil are prey.
There’s a game afoot in the world, and it contains nuances whereby those who understand the tolerances and limits of a system can bend the rules of that system to a degree, while others who focus on the letter of the law as being synonymous with its spirit falter under the weight of their ideals. Cynicism is lighter than a feather or air, those who have it don’t carry much. They accept the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be, and they operate within that world with ease. The right and the wrong are not their concern.
They make money and they make power, and both come at the expense of others. Power is unique in that it is both a means and an end, and the people who would use to benefit others rarely have it.
I’m limited by my conviction that everyone is created in the image of God; therefore, whatever I do to them is what I do to God. My job is to win in spite of the obstacles, to persist regardless of this inherent limitation on my own actions and responses. There is no why in the world; only how. The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it consistently fails to do.
Pedophilia and rape are effectively legal. A lack of enforcement makes that abundantly clear. For rape, the conviction rate is under 3%, so 97 out of 100 reported rapists are going to evade any culpability, in a world where under 35% of sexual assaults are reported. Around two and a half of those three are going to serve actual jail time, and when they do serve jail time, it’ll be a matter of months or days rather than years. When a man like Officer Colten Johansen-formerly of the Ogden Police Department-confesses to sexually abusing an infant and receives 30 days in jail and 60 days of home confinement, the reality is clear.
Virtually every news article detailing sentences for sex crimes exposes the reality that sex offenders receive light punishment compared to their victims. My own abuse has resulted in the same two recurring dreams even now. It’s affected my relationships and my career choices. My sexual abuse lasted a mere year and a half; the victims I interview and speak with usually have entire upbringings filled with daily sexual abuse. For me, that was the physical abuse.
The brutality of abuse and neglect is mind numbing to comprehend even for a limited time. When you experience and live it, you spend a good portion of your life asking why. There is no why. Some of us who suffer immensely grow up and do not abuse others. Some of us who suffer abuse as children grow up to be adults who choose to inflict that abuse on others. Those individuals might blame their childhoods or their trauma, but they chose to inflict a pain on others that they were intimately familiar with as victims. This renders their choice all the more senseless and inexcusable.
There’s no pleasure in inflicting pain, only the numbing realization that sometimes you have to in order to defend yourself and others. Sometimes, things have to be done. My most unpleasant memories are disciplining my nephews when they exhausted their parents and crossed the line into criminal activity that would have gotten any adult into serious legal trouble. It’s excruciating to discipline a child; it’s beyond quantification to discipline a child you love.
Taking that same child to lakes and a creeks and parks and restaurants is far more in line with what you want to do as their elder, but you aren’t raising them to be indulgent. You’re raising and influencing them to be functional, moral, and ethical members of their community. You do the unpleasant and hard things in the hopes that one day the world-or at least your section of it-will be as it ought to be, rather than what it is. I was never one for resignation. I picked up a rucksack of ideals and carried those ideals through the mud and the shit, the hot and the cold, refusing to accept that the world couldn’t be better.
I believe that a better world begins with one’s own internal condition, because out of the abundance of a man’s heart he speaks and acts. I stood against the why-less world, and refused to accept that there could ever be a why for certain things, while never giving evil a positive existence of its own. Darkness was merely the absence of light, it was not its own thing. The Devil has always been a bitch to me, a figure motivated solely by resentment and jealousy for what he was not and never would be: a creator.
He didn’t direct Eve to the Tree of Life. He wanted her and all of her children to die, not live. He wanted them to know, not to believe or trust. I choose to believe that things can and must be better, and I exert myself towards that end in my own life. I choose not to know that this world is impossibly corrupt and evil. I choose to believe that we can make it something else. I choose the hard things rather than the easy epiphanies. There is no labor in recognizing what the world is and settling for it.
There is a great deal of work in rejecting the world, and seeking to make it into something better for yourself and others. No matter how hard the work is, it is joyous to fight a rebellion against a tyrannical evil, to reject the lord of this world and refuse to capitulate to his norms. There is exultation in subversion. There may be no why, but there is a how, and slowly and steadily mastering the how to obliterate the corruption you despise and what it represents is happiness.
To hate the Devil is to truly love God. Deus Vult.