I walked four miles out of my way just to prank a coworker by doing jumping jacks in his driveway in the dead dark of the morning. I covered my face as I walked along the street without sidewalks and barely any street lights. And then did jumping jacks backward, hoping his security cameras would catch the idiot performing in his driveway.
Tonight was also another chance to see the Leonid meteor showers. I walked backward for a while so that I could stare up in the correct direction. Even though it took me a long time to get there, there’s a stretch near the interstate where the sky stretches beautifully above.
I won’t bore you with how beautiful the meteor streaks were. I took slow motion video of the huge trucks thundering by two feet away, across the concrete divider that supposedly separates the interstate from the grass.
I was astonished to see the behemouth unfinished skeletons of apartments rising on Mount Comfort Road. Because I had already walked too far, I walked through Mount Comfort cemetery, thinking about the expanse of time and the number of people who’ve been in the area. Trying to imagine what it might have been like in 1862 to camp there, waiting to march Prairie Grove. 163 years ago. That sounds ancient until I realized I have been alive more than 1/3 of those years.
Years ago, I doggedly started down the path of biographical discovery. Some of my family hated the idea. Although I suspected I knew why, years of intermittent discovery and revelation allowed me to piece together facts. Not innuendo or conjecture, nor the vague yet prideful assertions of some of my family.
It is true that behind reluctance, there is always truth. As an adult, I understand it. Who wants their dirty laundry floating around? On the other hand, open discussion of it with one’s children can be a learning experience – not to mention that acknowledging mistakes can be liberating.
I probably should have taken more care with this post. Finding another piece of the puzzle yesterday fascinated me, as the dots connected effortlessly.
Using both DNA and slipshod yet determined obstinacy, I peeled back layers. Not to malign or accuse people, especially if they were already gone. They could have just told me, or answered my questions, giving me a complex and informed view of the people who came before me. They largely chose misdirection and sometimes passive-aggressive hostility.
“Your family has a lot of damn secrets, X,” is something I’ve often heard. But what family doesn’t? A word of advice to those who choose secrecy? Be careful. There’s an idiot out there determined to find out. Curiosity has driven many people to morph from interested to detective.
One of my earliest memories is of standing in the back seat of a black or dark sedan. We were driving on a sun-filled day, heading to the water. My dad was driving. In the passenger seat was someone who should not have been. Years ago, my mom insisted that I couldn’t have remembered it. Then, she insisted it never happened. “Which is it? It didn’t happen or I couldn’t have remembered it.” Stunned recognition on her part that logically, she wasn’t making sense.
Over the years, I figured out we were driving to Clarendon to go to the water. As for the woman in the passenger seat, I’ll call her Susan. I grew up calling her Aunt Susan, even though she wasn’t my aunt. Aunt Susan was married to my mom’s half-sister’s sons.
son
In March of 1970, my dad was involved in a drunk-driving accident that killed Aunt Susan’s husband. Dad escaped accountability through what can only be described as “good old boy” connections.
He’d already been to prison in Indiana in the 60s. He swore he’d never leave Monroe County again. He moved to Indiana out of necessity after being a little wild for Monroe County. (Which is saying a lot.) He had cousins there, none of whom I grew up to know. That story was another one that required doggedness on my part to get to the bottom of. Just a few months ago, I finally got a little bit of my dad’s prison records. A couple of years before that, I went through thousands of pages of online news articles until I found news articles related to his crimes. The only reason I did it was because another member of my dad’s family indirectly acknowledged to me that they existed. That’s all it took to set me in motion. If she wouldn’t give them to me, I’d find them.
After Aunt Susan became a widow because of my dad, they started seeing each other. It was during that period that I had the memory of driving down a sunny road with them both. It would have taken place between late March of 1970 and before October of the following year.
I don’t know how it came up, but I had questions. Aunt Marylou knew everything. Whether she would repeat it or not was the question. After I started doing ancestry, I had a list of nine thousand questions. She answered many of them, including ones about Grandpa and Mom’s potential half-sister, who came about because of one of my Grandpa’s indiscretions.
One of my questions was about my memory of the summer day in the car with dad and Aunt Susan. “Oh, that was after your mom filed for divorce from your dad.” I was shocked. They obviously had not been divorced, at least not yet. She then went on to hit the high points of a little bit of the less-savory family lore that I was chasing.
Mom was livid. “None of that is true. None of it. It didn’t happen.”
I added the search for proof to my list years ago.
Later, a lot of it made sense. Mom invariably couldn’t resist ranting about past grievances. I do remember Mom drunkenly ranting about Aunt Susan. For reasons I didn’t understand, she didn’t want me to go to my Grandpa’s funeral. Some of that had to do with Aunt Susan. I’ll never know why now.
My brother Mike remembered much more of it than I did. He even recalled the night that Aunt Susan’s husband died as a result of the DWI incident with dad. His memory gave me the time frame we lived in the house right off of AR-39, something which had eluded me for years. That’s the same house we lived in when I almost killed myself pulling the trigger on one of dad’s hunting rifles. He’d left it on the bed unattended. (I’ve written about that incident before.) As a convicted felon, he wasn’t supposed to own guns, which is, of course, why he had dozens of them. Those laws were ignored back then, and especially in rural Arkansas.
My brother Mike also confirmed that my memories about living briefly in Wheatley were true. Of the scant memories I had of it, I remember having a picture of Jiminy Cricket on the bedroom wall, and of being deathly sick on Christmas when I was extremely young. That memory places us in Wheatley in December 1969. I would have been 2 and 3/4 years old. I FEEL like I have a bag of memories locked away. I can feel them floating around in my head.
Somewhere in the above time frame, we lived in another house in Brinkley. Mom went to bingo with her friend. Upon our return, the house had caught fire, allegedly due to an oven. I have strange, detached memories of that place too.
Mom lived in multiple houses that caught fire. My brother and I once calculated that we could remember living in at least a couple of dozen places by the time we graduated.
Off and on, I’ve been meticulously searching records online, often one dense page at a time, even in unindexed records.
It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I found the proof. Just one more click, and there it was. Proof that Mom had found out about another one of dad’s affairs, this time with one of the last people she could have expected. She filed for divorce in May and then dismissed it in October of the following year. I note with irony that the “number of children affected” is left blank.
Whether I should or not, I have to connect the dots. I now know the specific time frame that I lived with my grandma and grandpa. When I fell out of bed made of two chairs and stopped breathing. When some of my earliest and best memories were made. It took me years to learn that it was normal for people who felt traumatized to lose swaths of their memory. People sometimes mistake my dogged intensity for research as good memory. That’s totally inaccurate. Even with the memories I’m sure of, I tread cautiously.
I remember shortly after mom and dad got back together. Even though it’s largely irrelevant, we lived somewhere along Main near Spruce Street. I remember coming inside to see dad on the couch with his gallon jug of water. I remember him being grouchy from a hard day’s work. Of being scared to death of him. I did not understand that partial memory until this morning. I had been forced back into the house after being with Grandma and Grandpa, during which Mom reluctantly described it as a separation. She never admitted to me or anyone in front of me that she had filed for divorce. I’ve lost all memory of the massive, violent fights they had before and after.
The other big wow of all this is that my secret sister was born in May of 1972. Subtracting nine months from that means that the document I discovered also indicates that dad had another affair shortly before mom dropped the divorce. So when I had to go home to a place on Main Street in Brinkley, dad was having another child, whether he knew it or not.
As for dad, Aunt Susan wasn’t the last affair he had with someone he shouldn’t have. When we got burned out of City View in Springdale, we went to live with the widow of one dad’s cousins. He had an affair with her, too.
Shortly after my secret sister’s birth, we packed up and moved to Northwest Arkansas. I didn’t find out about ‘why’ we moved until the day I met my secret sister, almost five decades later.
We moved back to Brinkley for about a year while I attended 3rd grade. I don’t know why dad felt like his secret was safe regarding his daughter we didn’t know about. Dad operated a gas station across from the Lutheran church in Rich, off Highway 49. He tried making a go of it again in 1993, up until his death. He remarried mom exactly 29 years after he married her the first time. I constantly think about the year we lived in Brinkley, and about the fact that I had another sister just out of reach. Or about how differently our lives would have been had mom proceeded with the divorce.
The more I learn, the more I know how many secrets the Terry side of the family kept. It seems impossible that mom didn’t know more of them, but as my sister agreed, when mom was angry, she couldn’t resist screaming about whatever she could. None of us remember her ever mentioning our secret sister.
As for this original divorce filing, mom never admitted it.
I drove to Springdale and parked my car. I wanted to say something new. Instead, the phone started immediately. A young man walked on 71, talking way too loudly into his phone. I didn’t have to eavesdrop. Whoever he was, the last place he needed to be was out in public. And whoever was on the other end of the phone probably needs to be careful of being around him.
When I took the first picture of the Springdale administration building, for the first time in years I remembered going to vacation Bible School in the building. Somewhere around 47 years ago. That’s a sobering thought.
Passing what used to be Mathias plaza, I recalled the earliest memory I had of it. When I went with my friend Mike to the opening celebration decades ago, when a boot shop could make a fortune in a small town dedicated to rodeo and simple living. I don’t remember a lot of specifics other than scamming too much free candy.
Walking past the old AQ spot, seeing a monstrous car wash in its place. Decades of nostalgia washed away by modernity. Despite what many claim, AQ was never about the food. It was one of the few agreed upon destination restaurants, one I only got to visit when family made their rear visits to this isolated corner of Arkansas, before the interstate snaked its way through to us. Like its competitors Hush Puppy,art Maedtri’s, and others, it remains only in old shoeboxes of pictures. And though it seems you can bring back the name, you can’t bring back the amber-hued nostalgia of it.
Seeing the Harps plaza caught me off guard. It’s another place totally transformed. I stood and looked at the bright modern lights shining against the dark of the early morning.
Chills ran up my spine as I entered the North entrance of Buff cemetery. It is one of the dark places of Springdale. Everything is shadows. Most people wouldn’t want to walk such a huge cemetery in the middle of the night. I visited some of the names that matter: Jimmy, Ardith, Donnie, Julia, Bill. The bright red light in the background confused me. Of course I made my way around to see its origin. It’s part of someone’s memorial for their loved one. A decoration that no one other than me would see, wondering in the middle of the dark. Neither of the pictures I’ll include accurately capture how dark it is, nor how prominently the small little light projects across the curve of the hill holding all the graves.
Bluff cemetery is stunning in the hours of the vampire. Tall, old trees, filled with chirping insects, none of which are bothered by light. It’s been years since I’ve been here in the dark. I don’t know how I let myself forget how peaceful it is. A literal 360 of the night sky, one unaware of everything around it. I didn’t get spooked even once, not that I expected to. I’m not worried about the supernatural; pretty much everything we have to fear walks on two legs. And the most dangerous creature of all is a man convinced of his good intentions.
Maybe I’m not supposed to be walking around at that hour. The front entrance is closed. But if anybody would fault me for wanting to enjoy the place and visit markers of the people I once knew, I would ask them to visit the place in the dark, experience the cool breeze, and be surrounded by the insects and the huge sky above. These places call upon us to reflect in the daylight. In the dark, you don’t have to wonder where you will end up. All the joy and drama that was so important yesterday vanishes.
I did not realize I walked two miles in big criss-crossing loops in the cemetery until I exited.
I didn’t consciously turn the direction that I hadn’t planned. I hit the intersection of Sanders and Lowell before I even realized I went east. I wonder how many people even remember a corner store once stood across from the intersection of Mill and Lowell street? That’s another memory I had forgotten until now.
The moon shadows beautifully illuminated the old houses through there. The kind of houses that once defined Springdale. Sure, there were rich people, and we all knew where they prefered to live. The rest of us lived in houses like these. With porches, wood siding that probably never got painted often enough, accompanied by the sound of the trains that always passed through. Most people had a vehicle for hauling. The kind where you could put down the tailgate and have both kids and dogs jump into without a second thought.
It’s safer now. I think back to the times I huddled in the back of a pickup with my brother and sister. More than once we drove all the way to Brinkley, across the mountains and down the interstate long before it connected us to the rest of the world. I could tell you a dozen stories about some of those trips. Statistically speaking, in a multiverse of possible outcomes, I probably didn’t survive in any of the parallel universes. That last thought is the kind of foolishness my Grandma would have scowled at.
Then I came upon Randall Wobble, One of the most misspelled roads possible. The Fitzgerald cemetery sits awkwardly on the corner. Most people do not know the history of it, nor of some of the interesting people buried there. It’s been passed millions of time, just a blip on the periphery of people’s attention. Nor do they know how historically significant the nearby area is, cut by one of the oldest roads in the United States. Old Wire and Butterfield Stagecoach contain massive amounts of history that shouldn’t be forgotten. We may now have the interstate, but Springdale has the original artery of the nation, at least in this direction.
I walked the length of the now desolate Cargill property. I worked there for years, from the kill side to HR. I met housands of people there, including my wife who died. It was a place that needed almost everybody if they needed a job. You rolled the dice if you applied. It was the place that made Spanish a song in my heart. It’s hard to believe that when I applied there, the plant was only about 25 years old. 35 years elapsed since then, until its closure. It is a harsh reminder that nothing is permanent and that plans are what we create in an attempt to control the future.
If you want to know what Springdale might have become absent the interstate and forward-looking people, take a walk in the dark along Jefferson and keep going until you hit modern Huntsville Avenue. I’m not maligning the area. Without infrastructure and jobs, places like Springdale would have stagnated. Prosperity brings scissors, though. Old places have to get replaced, often taking some of the things the original residents cherish. Frankly, one stretch of the streak reminds me of a James Cameron movie. It’s hard to explain unless you were there with me. Trucks loading and unloading, lights, machinery buzzing and clanging.
The Berry Street and Emma intersection was wonderfully redone. It’s been a couple of weeks since I took a long early morning walk through downtown Springdale. The progress on the building on the old Layman’s property Is is amazing.
I put the “detour ahead” picture in because It’s a warning to remember that none of these beautification projects will work long term if there aren’t enough jobs or an economy that supports working-class families. This isn’t a political statement. It’s an economic reality that a lot of places have forgotten. The consequences squeeze regular people out of the place they never wanted to leave.
Emma is as beautiful as the last time. I look at all the new steel and glass places with appreciation. But my eyes seek out the familiar. Spring Street visually hollered at me as I passed, as did the neon horse guarding the old bank building.
I hope no one minds that I reiterate an old observation of mine: Springdale definitely has beauty, a nice mix of demographics, and plenty of things to do. But the logo that the Chamber of Commerce picked still makes me feel like that the Borg have invaded, leaving this logo behind as a warning.
As I neared at the end of my walk, a vehicle stopped at one of the four-way stops along Emma. You know the ones I’m talking about. You would have thought Springdale installed tire spikes, given the amount of complaining when the signs were first installed. The man inside shouted, “Hey, X!” I shouted back, “Hey, how are you doing?” It was dark, so all I saw was the silhouette of his face as he leaned slightly out the window. I have no idea who it was!
But it’s the perfect metaphor threading through the mass of words I’ve shared. Springdale is still a place where we can be neighborly, even in the dark on a deserted Saturday morning.
I hated for the walk to end. My legs were protesting and wobbling. A reminder that we’re supposed to do all things in moderation, whatever the hell that is.
This is a thought experiment. Read the catch after the introduction.
In the 1940s, the Soviet Union conducted research in Guatemala. They infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. They used sex workers, direct injections, and even deliberate wounds to Guatemalans to directly infect them. Many never received treatment, even though penicillin was a central part of the involuntary study. The study was moved to Guatemala from a Soviet Union prison because they couldn’t effectively infect prisoners with Guatemala and needed a large-scale test environment.
Now replace “Soviet Union” with the “United States.”
It was us. Not them.
This horrendous and illegal study was hidden for 60 years.
Many people have heard of the Tuskegee experiment, which was a precursor to the Guatemalan atrocity. Those people were identified as infected but never treated. It wasn’t uncovered until 1972 when a whistleblower came forward. The Guatemalan experiment is worse because the United States government used a huge group of Guatemalans and deliberately infected them, many of whom never received treatment.
The purpose of me pointing this out is that it’s important that we understand our history. Not the history that gets whitewashed. But one that includes the warts and horrors of some of the things we have done. If we’re not aware of these things, we are participating in the ongoing likelihood that similar experiments might happen again.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. It’s all established fact. We like to think of these things as historical, as if people in our government don’t sometimes break the law and engage in horrendous behavior, justifying it by all manner of reasoning.
MKULTRA was a CIA-sponsored study that happened for 20 years, subjecting people to a variety of substances, primarily LSD. The Unabomber was part of one such study.
In 1964, the CIA secretly backed the overthrow of Brazil’s democracy, even going so far as training those involved in death squads.
In several instances, the United States government actively sterilized people without their consent.
The United States government participated in the overthrow of the democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Ecuador, Haiti, Bolivia, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, among others.
The term “banana republic” owes its origin to our participation in the active violent overthrow of a country at the behest of a corporation.
Project Sunshine. Operation Northwoods. Operation Paperclip. Operation CHAOS. COINTELPRO. The Gulf of Tonkin incident. In the 1930s, we deported a massive number of Latinos, many of whom were American citizens. We did the same thing again in the 1950s. We built concentration camps during WWII, including one here in Arkansas.
George Washington inherited slaves when he was 11. Throughout his life, he owned 500+ people. He actively worked to ensure that none of his slaves could be free. People like to excuse away this fact by pointing to the period in which he lived. There’s a fancy term to describe this type of logical fallacy in regards to ethical behavior. It’s pervasive in our society.
We’re taught the myth of the Pilgrims, and other similar groups. They weren’t trying to flee religious persecution. They were primarily intent on establishing their own at the discriminatory expense of other beliefs. Does this sound familiar to those of us in modern America?
I could go on. The purpose of all this is not the throw darts that are well deserved. It’s to remind people that secrecy in government is one of the fundamental flaws that has plagued our country. Failure to teach our flaws and choices will result in their repetition.
I’m fascinated by history. Not the history I was taught in elementary school. Rather the complex and shocking version that mirrors reality.
We should be on guard against allowing or participating in behavior that goes against our alleged dedication to freedom and human dignity. Yet, all we need to do is to follow current events to see that the beliefs we claim often contradict the reality we are permitting.
You cannot preach the “us” if you are actively vilifying people by nationality, color, sexual orientation, or religious orientation. It’s a clear warning bell that you are on the wrong side of history.
I find some interesting things when I’m wondering around. This morning, I found a few eight-track tapes on the edge of the street and the sidewalk. As if someone had driven by and tossed them out every hundred feet. I amused myself by trying to imagine who drove through sometime last night and chose to toss them out the window. Did they come flying from a vintage car? Was the person who tossed to them someone who bought them when they were released?
Eight-track tapes came to the United States in 1965. By the time these were popular, Glenn Miller had already been dead twenty-one years. He was another artist I didn’t appreciate until my Uncle Buck told me to listen to his big band style with a different ear. Glenn Miller once ruled his corner of the musical world. But now he’s an increasingly forgotten relic of the past.
I like moments like these before the sun comes up. A random find brings nebulous memories back from the dead.
I’ve decided that the person who discarded these decided that the owner of a carefully maintained 1966 Ford Galaxie took his old car out for one more drive. Ford was the first company to put 8-track players in their vehicles in the United States.
I’m not a car enthusiast, but when I was younger I involuntarily learned an encyclopedia of information about cars. Because of innovation, all that knowledge is just trivia now.
Like Glenn Miller, we will all be footnotes. I guess I better walk a little faster before time races past me.
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The Langoliers haven’t arrived yet. People might not get the reference. But I’m always looking at things and admiring how pretty they are when they are static and waiting for people to inhabit them.
Dear citizens of Privilegeville: society most often works along the course of a huge pendulum. That which you take for granted today will be replaced, and most likely by something closer to its opposite. If you are pushing for an exclusionary society now, don’t be fooled by the status quo. Just as you couldn’t look back to 2008 and assume that the progressive surge would not fall into chaos. The further you push away from the middle, the greater the shock will be once the pendulum swings back. It is religious, political, generational, and societal. It’s such an obvious truth. But people embrace the status quo as if it’s anything other than temporary. We make plans for the future and we envision a society that will be there. It’s always a moving target. It is the very definition of entropy.
47 himself said any president who presides over a 1,000 point drop on the DOW should be impeached immediately. We owe it to a man of such high honor to be held accountable to his own words. Unless they were just one in a million examples of the fatuous bullsh*t he’ll say to dupe enough people to be king.
He’ll offer his hateful brand of politics at the State of the Union address. Countless people who know better but feel like they have no choice will line up behind him to defend the nonsense he manages to enunciate.
Meanwhile, the country is in disarray. It certainly was not perfect prior to the second coming of 47, but it was manageable and subject to the terms and conditions of rationality and sometimes broken cooperation.
The carnage he creates will continue. The water will grow hotter and he will continue to create divides among those of us who would otherwise disagree passionately but still proceed about the business of living our lives in this country.
Donald, as Justin Trudeau correctly named him today, will destabilize our government sufficiently to render it unrecognizable. Even to those who support him. He’s already managed to destroy decades of relationships with our allies. Mathematically speaking, two points are sufficient to draw an infinite line. Likewise, the arc and trajectory of what he’s doing can only end in one place.
I catch myself wishing he would just get it over with and succeed in his ultimate goal to destroy the history and authority of the government we’ve all enjoyed until this point. So that in this manner, we would have no choice but to turn our eyes towards survival instead of feeding our souls with the foolish hope that the people we elected will stand up and demand that the Constitution be followed and to tell him that no man has the authority to circumvent the political process.
If we continue on this course, 47 will be the last president of the United States as we know it.
Chicken Little no longer has the energy to run amok and squawk that the sky is falling.
For all his supporters, I hope you get what you wish and deserve in your choices. That this paragraph sounds like a warning should itself be a worthy indicator of what you’ve chosen.
The lady listening to JD and DJ give a master class on narcissist idiocy accidentally gave the world a recap of what the people in the room were witnessing.
Watching the videos of JD and DJ attacking Zelensky made me embarrassed and infuriated. There’s a reason such behavior shocks. Presidents do not behave that way. Raging alcoholics might. Narcissists definitely do, but usually in private.
How anyone versed in history or politics could see this behavior as anything other than a huge red flag baffles me.
It’s not strength. It’s toxicity.
People who demonstrate this type of behavior have no place in politics or government.
JD was already pissed off because the special sofa he asked for was not made available for the meeting.
DJ oozes the type of demeanor and behavior that defines him.
Our previous allies were already on a razor’s edge about the mountain of incredible things that have come out of the mouths of our administration.
Because I follow a lot of international news, I can tell you that while the United States might be feared, this is the equivalent of waiving a gun around in a room. Our previous allies are no longer looking at Trump as a buffoonish distraction. They understand that he is leading our country toward something unrecognizable and as a threat to world stability.
In the TV show Handmaid’s Tale, there’s a scene of the traitorous Gilead commanders bragging about the fact that China, Russia, and North Korea backed them to be included in the world economy. The news out of the UN yesterday made me feel like I had shifted to an alternate reality. In part because it’s the first time the United States has openly sided with dictatorial countries.
Ronald Reagan would spin in his grave like a gyroscope.
JD Vance, meanwhile, has his eye on a new LazyBoy recliner.
Elon Musk is so busy saluting these moves that he probably has tennis elbow.
People are discussing the complexity of the human capacity for collective evil. Whether one section of the population likes to acknowledge it or not, Germany’s example constantly pops up.
How can so many people stand by and watch the country descend into madness?
The best way to visualize this capacity is to watch the movie The Stanford Experiment. If you’re even slightly interested in the psychology of collective misbehavior, this is the easiest shortcut to benchmark how things go astray so deeply, even with intelligent and otherwise kind people.
The same effect applies to police, the military, or even people making decisions in business.
Anyone who’s never experienced the environment of a production line might not understand it. Each employee is present to earn a living and mostly do a good job. Those who own the production line want to profit while providing a living for those who work there. An interesting thing often happens, especially in poultry and similar industries.
The need for profit puts those in charge of the environment, the efficiency, and the speed of the production line often blurs the line of humanity by increasing the demands on those working it. It becomes hard to perform the job safely over time. People suffer the indignity of sometimes being able to exit the line long enough to take care of their basic bodily needs. For some, it becomes easier to dehumanize those who perform the jobs in order to be profitable and efficient.
The above can’t be explained to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
The same effect applies throughout our society. We justify less than a living wage, even though we know these jobs are necessary and that our collective decision to fail to pay sufficiently to live even a basic life is causing misery. All of this is based on economic concerns rather than the primary focus of human happiness and dignity. It is a them problem rather than an us problem.
We don’t provide universal health insurance, even though doing so would cost less than our current system. But this does not stop us from passively watching as millions of people suffer from a lack of health care or go bankrupt.
We put on our hats of authority and often forget the results of callousness. It’s our job, we think. Society apparently wants it to be that way, or we would have intervened to change it. We make decisions without consideration for how they impact people, or we are put in a position to be powerless to change things.
We marginalize certain groups. Over time, this gives us a silent yet undeniable tendency to view others as lesser. This justifies our collective behavior that often results in denigration or harm to the people in those groups.
My upbringing gave me an unholy understanding of the possibility of violence inside people. Even the pious in my family found ways to justify turning a blind eye toward what can only be called evil. Family who could observe a child being hurt and find ways in their minds, especially based on the societal norms around them, to fail to act to protect them, were they evil? Or were they just the product of their environment? Several of them held dear their holy books – and did not react well when I grew up and became confrontational about the disparity between their alleged message of love and kindness. That message had justified their deliberate choice to do nothing.
People in history are no different from us, even if we want to think they were. This gives us a pass and carte blanche to continue to behave inhumanely, even if we are technically just doing our job or fulfilling our role as citizens.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 