Werewolf’s Kiss, the Crip Circus and Trauma Trapeze All-Stars Lusting for a Lick of that Hard Candy
Feels real dirty now, this endless flogging of pain for profit, these advocates wearing as showpieces the brutalized corpses of the children-they-once-were, grabbing our heads with both hands if we try to look away from those scars. They show us their most intimately-ravaged parts as acts of initiation into their own little misery cults.
I’ve been as appalled, as horrified, as aching with compassion as any normal person ought to be, confronted with these terrible, terrible recountings of abuse, of rape, of physical mutilations—but the relentlessness of the drive to cash in on the most private anguish is starting to make my whiskers twitch.
I hate doubting the injured, when the damage is so clear. They were savaged; their child-selves were murdered before they could reach a natural maturity. They can never become what they might have been.
But what deranged those idiot parents who served up their children’s breasts and genitals to purported medical professionals? What is creating so many supposedly high-functioning autistic kids unable to cope with the normal and expected stages of life?
What so deformed a family that a mother and father would repeatedly serve up their little girl to a rapist? Who bit those parents right down to the bone, that they were turned into ravening creatures unable to properly express the most primal instincts we all ought to be born with?
Whenever I’ve asked these questions on social media or in comments threads, I get pretty ferocious responses and then I get blocked or banned. Honesty is not wanted by some of those howling for justice; they’re howling for a taste of innocent blood too.
The hardest struggle in the world is to become mature. It’s a death-wrestle with yourself, to strangle the parts you might secretly enjoy most. You must learn to stay your hand, to stop your tongue; you can never give up vigilance against the worst of your humanity. You must force yourself into unnatural forbearance.
The terrible thing about violence inflicted on children, the taint it leaves, you can’t escape admiring the power; you want to get some for yourself. The marrow of your own bones is permanently infected with the capacity to enjoy cruelty. Still I was startled, recently, seeing it break through the skin of one who’s claimed great self-awareness and the transformative work of her therapist. I was surprised to see lying by someone who claims to despise it.
I have no pity for anyone who harms a child or an unguilty person, but I want to know what made them so capable of evil. These are mostly not great metaphysical mysteries but clear pathways, generation to generation, of failure and wrong choices; of physiological injuries because of the use of or exposure to deleterious substances or of poor nutrition at the most dangerous moment.
And public intellectuals will always invent clever terms to market their branded nostrums for the temper of the times. For them it’s good business sense. For us it’s cowardice, letting them blame society. An actual nameable person has always taken the first bite.
Chapter 18 in Matthew, verses 1 through 10 in the Bible tells us how we are to treat little children. Verse 6, But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.