On Relaying Shock

Three posts ago, in the post I titled Rare Serious Poem, I depicted an act of child abuse, namely extended rape by enema. When the poem was printed in Real Change 12 years ago a reader wrote an angry letter that said that people like me are the reason we have child molesters. He said that I was wrong to write to shock in such a way, that in doing so I was giving the child abusers ideas.

His letter made me angry. I did not write that passage to shock. I wrote it to accuse. What I described happened to me. I wasn't making something up to shock prudes. I was telling the world what had been done to me and accusing it of doing nothing to stop it.

I am bringing this up now because we've turned a corner in my memoirs here and the accounts of abuse are going to involve sexual abuse. When I was a child and I told people about the sexual abuse that I'll be describing, in attempts to get help, I was told by many people that I WAS EVIL for accusing my parents.

No. THEY were evil. They were vicious evil immoral trash. As I was a child, they were free to threaten me then with violence, saying they'd wash my mouth out with soap, proving they were as evil as my parents. They could also turn me in to my parents, and at least two did. I hate those people for their cowardly vicious threats and betrayals, more than I hate my Mother for the original abuse. They represented the world. There were as many of them, at least a dozen, that I could bear to plea to for help, before the threats and betrayals became too much. Then I could no longer believe the risks of further betrayals were worth it, and I gave up. No one of them crushed my hope. It took all of them in succession. They were, as the Christians say, witnessing for their beliefs and values, and their witnessing showed their beliefs and values to be lacking.

The difference now is, I'm not a vulnerable child anymore, and I'm not a child you can threaten or betray anymore. This post will be a warning to anyone who doesn't like that my words shock. I'm not the one who committed the acts that words relate, which are the root and source of the shock. I was the one who endured them.

Ask yourself this. If as a child of 2 or 4 or 7 or 13 I could endure the kind of "shocking" abuse I'm going to be describing, how weak are the ones who can't even take the descriptions?

Some of the people I related these events to at the time said I was evil because I was violating a Biblical Commandment, in dishonoring my parents. I did not dishonor them. They dishonored themselves. They, in their turn, blasphemed their own God, by suggesting that He approved of silencing children pleading for relief from severe abuse. If that were true, if it were the true intent of that one of the Ten Commandments, then that would in itself be complete sufficient grounds for regarding the Christian God as unworthy of any reverence.

I would not go out of my way to make my own God look so bad.