The face of evil

I just finished a book that I'm going to be thinking about for a very long time; Alice Oseman's wonderful, devastating, beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant novel Radio Silence.

What has kept my mind coming back to the story over and over since closing the last page is not the pair of main characters, Frances Janvier and Aled Last, as well-drawn and engaging as they are; it's a minor character -- at least judging by the number of scenes in which she actually appears -- Aled's mother, Carol Last, whose influence pervades the entire story like some kind of awful miasma.

She's not what I would call "big evil."  Mrs. Last is no Sauron, no Darth Vader, no Jadis the White Witch.  She has no desire to rule the world and mow down thousands.  Her evil is so small as to be almost banal.  She "redecorates" Aled's room while he's away at school, destroying all of his posters and adornments, even painting over the mural of a galaxy he'd created on his ceiling, replacing it with a blank white surface.  She has his old dog put down without his knowledge, without even a chance to say goodbye.  She sends him a saccharine text every single time he makes a new episode of his beloved podcast, about spending his time in more productive pursuits instead of his "silly little show."  She takes her daughter's "inappropriate" clothing and burns it in the back yard, right in front of her.

And each and every time, she has an unshakable justification for why she does what she does.  There's always a reason, and any objections have about as much effect on her as an ocean wave striking a cliff face.  In the most chilling scene in the whole book, Mrs. Last proudly shows Frances what she's done to Aled's room while he's away, saying with a tight little smile, "It's just a few little rearrangements here and there.  I'm sure he'll appreciate a change...  Feels very fresh, don't you think?  A cleaner, emptier space makes a cleaner, sharper mind."

She doesn't even listen for Frances's response; of course the answer is yes.

For the Mrs. Lasts of the world, the answer is always yes.

It's a tribute to Alice Oseman's skill as a novelist that my response to Mrs. Last was as strong as it was.  But why we all feel revulsion at such a character is telling.  It's like an analysis I read a while back of why the most hated character in the Harry Potter universe isn't Lord Voldemort -- far and away, it's Dolores Umbridge.  

Very few of us, fortunately, ever meet a Lord Voldemort.

But all of us know a Dolores Umbridge.  A teacher, a boss, a family member, a significant other, an acquaintance who, given a little power, uses it to tear down the souls of the vulnerable or dependent, and remodel them to suit.  A person who couches it all with a sweet smile that never reaches the eyes and a declaration of, "You know it's all for your own good, dear."

This, for most of us who have read the Potter series, is the real face of evil, not the grotesque, distorted visage of Lord Voldemort.

I know a lot of the reason that both Dolores Umbridge and Mrs. Last made me as sick at heart as they did is that my own childhood was laced through with this sort of thing.  Nothing as overt as what Dolores did to Harry or what Mrs. Last did to her children, perhaps; but the message I got was nothing if not consistent.  "You can't possibly like that music/television show/book/movie, can you?"  "Why are you wasting your time with that?"  "Mrs. So-and-So's son has accomplished so much, she must be so proud of him.  Maybe you should try following his example."  "Why bother with that?  You'll just give up in three weeks when you find out how hard it is."  And, most pervasively, over and over again, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about what I cared most deeply about, what I was passionate about.

My response was much like Aled's in Radio Silence; hide.  Protect what I loved so it wouldn't be destroyed.  It came out in uglier ways, sometimes; I did my own share of mistreating those who were vulnerable, to my everlasting shame, living up to my grandma's wise if tragic words that "hurt people hurt people."  I became secretive, angry, and deeply despondent.

And it took me years to admit that this subversive attempt to demolish who I actually was and rebuild some new, improved version was nothing short of emotional abuse.

That the Mrs. Lasts in my own life didn't win was more due to luck than anything I did to stop them.  For the past twenty years especially I have been fortunate enough to have people in my life who are determined to nurture rather than destroy, and I can say truly that they saved my life, both figuratively and literally.  

I'll end this post with an exhortation to be that for the people around you; do not ever underestimate the power of simply appreciating and loving those you meet for who they are, embracing their weird, unique wonderful selves without feeling any need to change them.  Drop the desperate need to hem people in, to make them conform to some arbitrary standards of how they dress, what they eat, what music and books and shows they love.  Thank heavens we don't all feel passionate about the same stuff, right?  How boring would it be if every last person had exactly identical tastes, loves, opinions, and obsessions?

I'll end with a quote from someone I've quoted here many times before: journalist Kathryn Schulz, whose astonishing TED Talk "On Being Wrong" should be required listening for everyone.  Toward the end, she has an observation about why different perspectives don't imply that one person is right and the other is wrong -- and how sterile the world would be if that were true:

But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human.  It's like we want to imagine that our minds are these perfectly transparent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.  And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing.  That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring.  The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is.  It's that you can see the world as it isn't.  We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place.  And the most beautiful part is that we all do this a little differently.

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The God-given right to abuse

In today's post, I'm going to allude to two news stories I ran across in the last couple of days that are so upsetting, so completely nausea-inducing, that I am going to omit most of the details and simply direct you to the links if you want to read more.  (If that disclaimer wasn't enough, let me be blunt: serious trigger warning regarding violence and abuse directed at children and teenagers.)

In the first, a man named Isauro Aguirre was just handed the death penalty in California because he had killed his girlfriend's eight-year-old son.  The reason?  He "thought the boy was gay."

The second was written by the young man who was the target of the abuse.  Rex Ogle, now 38 years old, was given forty-eight hours to leave his home with only what he could carry when he was eighteen.  For three months he lived on the street, eating out of trash cans, sleeping outside in all weather, until he broke down and called his grandmother for help.  The reason?

His stepmother had outed him to his father as gay, and his father told him, "If you choose to be gay, then you’re no longer part of this family.  You want to live that lifestyle?  Then do it somewhere else."

"In my father's defense," Ogle writes, "he had offered me a choice."  The choice was that he could leave, or remain part of the family -- as long as he attended church three times a week, asked a girl out and stayed with her (or another girl who was approved by his father), and he promised to "never seek to associate with a person of the homosexual persuasion."

In other words, lie to the world about who he is.  He realized he couldn't do that.  The result: forty-eight hours later, a man stood stern and dry-eyed while watching his own son walking down the driveway, weeping, carrying nothing but what he could fit in a backpack.

In both cases, the defense by the abuser was that "being gay is wrong."  God disapproves.  Therefore, a true believer has the license to abuse, and still claim that he's on the moral high ground.

Readers will no doubt be fast to point out two objections.

First, many Christians don't do this sort of thing.  Which I grant you.  I know many devout Christians who are, I'm sure, as disgusted by the abuse outlined above as I am.  However, one thing I don't hear often is those same Christians publicly denouncing the origin of such behavior -- and the church and political leaders who sanction it.

A second legitimate objection is that Christianity is hardly the only religion that has condoned violence against LGBTQ individuals.  Hell, in areas controlled by strict Muslims, gay men have been pitched off rooftops; if they survive the fall, they're stoned to death.  Which is certainly true.  But since when is "they're doing it too" any kind of justification?

So the general response is to defend evangelical Christianity against any responsibility for this sort of thing.  The interesting thing, however, is that the perpetrators of the abuse themselves are completely unequivocal as to where the reason comes from.  God told them it was the right thing to do, and their defense is "my holy book tells me what is right and wrong."

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sure, the Bible and the Qur'an both prohibit homosexuality.  The problem is, there are a whole lot of other things the Bible and the Qur'an prohibit that no one seems to take especially seriously, even the ones who call themselves fundamentalists.  I'll look at the biblical ones, because I'm not well-versed in the Qur'an, but I have no doubt the same is true there.  (Here's a list of some of the actions prohibited by the Qur'an, but be aware I haven't checked them for accuracy.)

Here are a few prohibitions from the Bible, along with the relevant verse:

• Eating shellfish.  (Leviticus 11:12)
• Tattoos.  (Leviticus 19:28)
• Marrying after getting a divorce.  (Mark 10:11-12)
• Women speaking in church.  (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)
• A man being uncircumcised. (Genesis 17:14)
• Lending money at interest. (about a dozen different verses address this, starting with Leviticus 25:37)
• Women braiding their hair, or wearing gold or pearls. (Timothy 2:9)
• Coming into church if you're handicapped or "have a blemish." (Leviticus 21:17-23)
• Praying in public. (Matthew 6:6)

The fact of the matter is, nobody's following the Bible to the letter.  All of the inconvenient stuff is simply ignored.  So is the stuff that could get you thrown in jail (such as owning slaves and/or killing them [Leviticus 25:44-46] and stoning disobedient children to death [Deuteronomy 21:18-21]).

So why all the focus on LGBTQ individuals?

Because the idea of two guys or two women having sex makes some people feel squinky.  It has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the Bible.  If it did, you'd find the Westboro Baptist Church loonies waving signs around in front of Red Lobster, and way less of this kind of thing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons A guy saved by Jesus, Romans cross tattoo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Not to mention way fewer female televangelists like Leigh Valentine, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Joni Lamb.

I am sick unto death of people using their religion to justify being horrible to others.  I don't give a flying fuck what you think about what I should be doing with my naughty bits.  It is, frankly, none of your damn business.  There's also the issue that homosexuality has unequivocally been shown to be connected to brain wiring -- i.e., it isn't a choice and never has been.

So disowning or torturing and killing your own child because they're LGBTQ is about as moral as doing so because they have freckles or brown eyes, whatever the Bible says about it.

It is appalling that we are even still having to fight this battle.  A lot of my LGBTQ friends are petrified about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy -- as conservative as he could be, he was at least a swing vote on social issues.  Now, with Donald Trump and his evangelical cronies to pick the next Supreme Court Justice?  No one really doubts that once they've established an ultraright majority, the first thing they'll topple is Roe v. Wade.

And the second thing they'll come after is LGBTQ rights.  In other words, unless we're very lucky, there'll be legal coverage for discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

I hope reading this has pissed you off enough to make your voice heard.  We are at a crossroads, I think, when we will either continue down the road of letting an amoral bunch of wannabe theocrats drive policy in this country, and move us further toward oppression and bigotry, or else enough people will stand up and say, "Stop.  Stop right here."

But that will only happen if we're willing to say that.  Loudly.  Over and over, and regardless of the personal consequences.  Otherwise, I fear that we're headed for a very dark period in history.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.