X’s & Y’s - (aka: "my bitterly angry woulda-been masterpiece that very few grokked, and not just because of the epic run-on-sentences")

☯ Once upon a long ago in a government housing project far away stood my mother, then but a young girl who faced a gigantic decision of difficult proportions and complicated underpinnings beyond her 19 years.  In that single moment – time suspended precariously between the second my father propelled his closed fist in her direction and its cement-hard collision with her delicate face – the girl froze in textbook deer-in-headlights fashion while adrenaline rushed through her veins, synapses in her frontal lobe fired furiously, and her psyche attempted to divine some degree of recognizable order amid the chaos her physical and environmental stimulus presented.  A group of four musicians from the working class of 1970’s England who not coincidentally called themselves “The Clash” sang it all those years ago: “darlin’ you’ve got to let me know, should I stay or should I go?”

☯ FYI: this formula is easily transferable. Firstly, it can be applied to individuals or groups, personally known or not.  Regarding the above question (“Why do they stay?”), the variable “they” = “women or men who stay with abusive assholes who consistently treat them like shit.”  “They” can just as easily be replaced with the pronouns “she,” “he,” or even a personal name (example: “Edith Bunker”).

☯ Once this basic formula is mastered, the sky’s the limit for the pronounced judgments that can be made on others, and further still, the self-congratulation with which one can adorn oneself.  Examples:  “Why do homeless drug addicts unscrupulously steal property from department stores? Their theft means the price of my big ticket appliance goes up. No one made them do drugs and destroy their lives. I would never do that – I’m a responsible, productive member of society.”   “Why do those lazy-ass welfare bums complain so much about the free handouts they get?  If it weren’t for this country and my taxes, they wouldn’t have anything at all and then they wouldn’t be able to feed all those kids they keep having.  I would never do that. I am grateful for the opportunities I’m given, and I take care of the things and people I’m responsible for without complaining all the time.”

“Why do  (x ↔ y)?  I  would never (y).”

☯ My own abuser used to casually declare, “you let me do it, so it’s okay that I did.”  Or my all-time favorite illustration of such dizzying logic: he would punch me in the head, immediately point his finger in my face, and state in calm tones normally reserved for a truly enlightened ascetic, “you are choosing what you are experiencing right this second.  You are choosing this.  It’s all in your head.”  ( As A Man Thinketh, and all that.)

☯ Rewind - Memory: when I was about 20 years old, I remember sitting in a park one lovely summer day and landing in a conversation with a friendly stranger who, having just smoked some killer weed, felt inclined to initiate philosophical discourse with anyone in close proximity. His discourse lazily meandered into the notion of “choice.”  Unable to see my personal forest for the trees at the time, I remember responding to the smiling stranger’s declaration that we all have free will and personal choice by saying, “Yeah. Well, choice is often tempered by circumstance, and we don’t always get to choose our circumstances.”  He was amazed by my statement.  “Wow!  That is soooooo deep!  I’m gonna quote that… can I quote that?”   I remember being puzzled by his reaction, since I felt I’d done nothing but state the extremely obvious.

☯ Fast Forward - Moment After Impact: while brilliant stars and erratic points of light bounce around inside my retinas because of the minor trauma to my own skull, and the razor sharp pain from the impact on my head gradually diffuses into a dull ache slowly dripping behind my ear and down my neck like rotten honey, a tiny voice somewhere in the distant caverns of my mind wrestles with his nonchalant explanation of choice – namely, mine.  That I was choosing the experience.  Why am I choosing this?  How can I learn to choose something else?

☯ It didn’t matter how hard I thought differently or how hard I tried to choose a more enlightened choice.  A punch to my head always hurt.  It hurt in ways that could be seen (bruises and bumps) and also in ways that only I could feel (in my mind, spirit and heart).

☯ “It’s all in your head” – his declaration is the judgement in and of itself.  The equation it represents, however, is profoundly simple and is transferable well beyond a mere punch in the head (where x = any physical, mental or emotional experience or situation; and y = one’s actions and/or reaction):

 ( x ) ∞ ( y ).

☯ I tried fervently to choose differently for nearly fourteen years. It wasn’t until three years after I managed to get away from my relationship with him that my brain was able to percolate the question “wait a minute…why did he choose to hit me in the first place?” It wasn’t until after I managed to get away from him that I finally learned it’s not okay for someone to hit me and then hold me responsible for the fact.

☯ (Yeah, well… we’re all fucking geniuses in hindsight.)

☯ Meanwhile, over a twenty-year span, a pig farmer habitually promised extremely marginalized women easy work and good fun at his farm, and for endless reasons they each quite desperately needed the money he promised to pay them, and so they chose to trust and go with him, and he killed on the public record six but in the real world probably 70 of them.  

And he cut the women’s bodies into pieces and fed their butchered parts to pigs, and he buried the women’s bones and teeth like scattered seeds all over his property, the vessels of their souls chopped and slopped and thrown away in darkest, hidden mud and sod... the souls and light of my Mother, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Niece, Lover, Friend… the 70 She-s who so very easily could have been Me… these women whose names are forever drowned in the heaviest, darkest weight of the permanent bond to the accursed sound of their murderer’s name “Pickton,” merely one of too many specimens in our world, God save us, of his particularly monstrously violent kind. 

And yet still, even now, even after the soil of Mother Earth herself finally turned and forced remembrance of these dismembered women by crying forth thousands of pieces of their DNA, each and every sample exhumed into the scorching light of day, and blowing open the Pandora’s box of the unimaginable horrors of “What Happened,” the scathing reality of what so many closed eyes and minds and systems and prejudices allowed to transpire, the flaying Truth that lays a molecule’s width beyond the softer, cushier comforting feel of the denial and the blindfolds ever-woven over and through our own eyes and cultural lens… still there are the people on this planet who, from their safe niches nestled galaxies away and apart from all the countless places and spaces in our world where predators can and do so easily target and kill with impunity our most vulnerable humans… even still there are people capable of blithely stating that those 70 women chose their experience and got what they deserved.

☯ And all because of something so entirely trivial as:

 ( y ).

☯ And while the intellectuals and conversationalists forever debate, expound and wax philosophical, the young girl from that once ago far away, me, 70 women who died because a pig farmer chose to kill them, and anyone else who ever stood in the face of gigantic decisions of difficult proportions and complicated underpinnings beyond their years… we have always been, we always are, and we always will be left to fend entirely for ourselves.

☯ Judgment from others, it seems, is a given regardless… and it will descend either way.