Requiem [COMPLETED]

The Search For Truth

"You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."

— Carl Sagan (Contact)

It's a curse on the family. It's the curse of all families. Progenitors either sacrifice to give children what they never had, but sabotage it by showing them that all parents can do is sacrifice themselves on the altar, burnt offerings to the gods against a child's uncertain future-- or they put themselves first and their navel-gazing selfish weaknesses leave their children out in the cold to try and survive without the safety net they should have been able to depend upon. Does it all have to end in such futile collapses of the family? Do we really carry within us one or another seed of potential destruction, sprouting upon the instant a child is born, that grows and wends its way through the body as it ages like the wasp larvae that zombify and eat their living host, only leaving after the child has become a changeling, an empty wooden shell with no heart?

Our family is our legacy; it is the closest to immortality that any of us will ever get. And yet the family itself can be the thing which destroys the individual. Maybe that was what eventually drove me into writing; I needed an outlet for these questions before I was buried by their weight. Perhaps the questions can be answered by the reader, for this author, even in middle age, cannot find any answers that comfort me. Even with my doubt, I look around and discover I've created my own family, with its own set of flaws. Yet it is more a family than any bond I felt as a child. Still though, when I look at my children, when I catch a certain look from Sven in a quiet moment, I wonder: How much are we to blame, to shoulder guilt?

This isn't to say that we shouldn't learn lessons from the past. But using the guilt and blame as leverage to prove somehow the innocence or guilt of a person isn't fair or accurate. There are no wins and losses when people are hurt; only loss. The innocent may feel guilty; and maybe they didn't do absilutely everything they could have to fight the wrongdoing; but the point remains, why should they somehow be blamed for another person's bad intentions and actions? Too often we blame the victim, not realizing we are in part justifying the attacker, just because we feel uncomfortable with the event and want to somehow distance ourselves from the possibility that it could happen to someone we know.

If anything, the takeaway from our story isn't that anyone can triumph over hardship, or evil; it should be that people who do bad things too often get away with it. Justice, or revenge, is not often served. Despicable acts are despicable acts, and they aren't solely the doing of Christians or atheists or white people or poor people. Abuse is the realm of the irrational, and hatred is king there. That Sven and I survived amounted to happenstance and luck as much any attempt at strategy. It's a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive or not practical for the government or society at large to try and prevent the abuse of children. It's not just that the battle we're fighting has no face or home or language, that it lives everywhere we do. The war we're fighting is against bilious rage and an absense of empathy. And the first step to defeating that rage is by not turning people like grandpa into points on a scoreboard. He was abused; he abused others. While still holding him accountable for his actions, we have to acceed that he didn't magically develop in a vacuum.

The war we're fighting is also against indifference. The indifference of good people who won't go out of their way when they see or suspect something is wrong, for fear of seeming presumptuous, for fear of being wrong, or from simply feeling that it's too much work to make a fuss. That's a scarier reaction than all of grandpa's anger against us, because it violated all the rules and bonds of society. It's scary because you realize most people don't give a shit about a human life being extinguished, even an innocent one, as long as it's not their own life. This is why abuse, neglect, murder, why these things are so frightening. It's not because some people are sick enough to hurt others. It's because in the war against such violence we are often our own worst enemies by failing to help eachother; and too often, when forced to fight these battles, we are forced to do so alone.