Hateful actors snarling directly in your face are hard to miss, and, when it comes time, you can at least get your hands up to defend yourself against them when they’re overcome by the need to do you violence.  It’s the subtle blows, delivered by those who profess to hold your best interests at heart, blows made to feel like something you yourself have brought on, somehow, that can really cripple you.

“Spoken like a man who has never been whipped in the face every day for the first couple of years of his life,” observed the skeleton.

Sad though it feels to me today, a grown-man on the edge of old age with the skeleton of his dead father on his knee like a chipper, razor-thin Charlie McCarthy, it’s a point that needs to be made again.  To say it more clearly: it’s a point that I need to make again.  

Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, told Ken Burns’s team that she always saw, and continues to see, the subtle racism of the north as more detrimental, more destructive, than the openly racist style practiced by the genteel defenders of their traditional way of life in the south.   She pointed out that it’s much easier to see and fight good old-fashioned in-your-fucking-face racism, like not being allowed to use a bathroom, than the falsely smiling kind that denies it is anything but bad luck that bad things keep happening to unlucky blacks in cities where there are no laws, rules or even customs against them.  You can’t hit what you can’t see, though it will continue to hit you at will.

I muse about this, even as I remain unable not to provoke those who simply accept their own faults, smile about their own anger, reckoning these as small things that have not hampered them in any terrible way.  As long as you can get up every day, hit the heavy bag, the speed bag, do a little road work, spar, get ready for the next bout, what need for time-wasting introspection?  Who, outside of a self-pitying fool, would spend hours every day probing their own wounds, trying to get to the bottom of mysteries so deep they can never be plumbed? Even the Bible observes that a fool’s main desire is to lay his own soul bare. 

One has to respect their right to this satisfied opinion, or, at least to accept that this opinion is tightly held.  People who don’t seek insight into their actions are less interesting to me, and less compelling as characters or friends, than those who struggle toward understanding.   I am becoming an intolerably pompous and demanding person this way, it seems to me lately, but one has to respect my right to choose those who seek sometimes uncomfortable understanding over those who are always satisfied.  Or not.

The ass-whippings my father got from his tiny mother were direct and violent.  They came without ambiguity, explanation or commentary– what, after all, is more eloquent and self-explanatory than a series of unrestrained lashes across the face?   Most people I know who have gripes against how they were raised grapple with things much more ambiguous: being constantly undermined, slighted, mocked, ignored at key moments when it was most crucial to have been heard.  

Here, take your pick.   Which would you rather be, as a two year-old and for the rest of your days — teased and ridiculed or beaten?  Slapped hard every morning, noon and night or the victim of acerbic sarcasm?  Hardly seems there is much to choose there, most people would take the words.  

Get up every morning when the alarm rings, use the bathroom, do a few stretches, shower, try to eat a healthy breakfast, head to work, work, go to the gym, come home, try to have a healthy dinner, watch some TV or read a good book, go to sleep at a reasonable hour, do it again.  Try your best, when you can, not to do what is hateful to you to the children in your home, but, since nobody is perfect, and feeling guilty afterwards is always easier than doing the right thing in real-time, why agonize or obsess about any of it?

“Well, you hit on an important point, Elie,” said the skeleton, “it is much, much easier to apply the lash of guilt to yourself afterwards than to always overcome the urge to yank your kid’s arm out of the socket in a crowded supermarket when the kid is being irrationally insistent.  The supreme challenge of raising a kid, I hardly need to point out, is something you’ll never understand as well as a parent.  People do the easiest thing, almost always.  Look at you right now, tapping away here, putting words in my mouth instead of attending to a hundred more important things.  You can feel you’re doing important work, somehow, but that’s what everybody feels when they’re out making a living.  Which, I point out gratuitously here on your ‘gratuitous blahg’, you have never done, except in a few moments of weakness, when you absolutely had to.”

You see what I’m saying?  There are words that can stop you in your tracks, perfectly timed reminders that echo from long ago, being heard countless times:  you will fail, you are doomed, others may be worthy of the love and respect of the ticket buying crowd, have interesting things to say, things they say winningly– but people like us are born to lose, and there is no anarchistic glory in that either, no matter how proudly you might have it tattooed onto your giant bicep.  

Look it at this way: I am determined to struggle against these destructive voices, the famously forceful indifference of a world that professes to have only two categories: winners and losers.  Winners win and losers lose, simple as that, loser.  If you have to agonize over which is which, or why this is the case– hah!  You have already lost!  Loser.

Or, best of all, and most disgustingly succulent to a fellow like me, sensitized to it as my father was to that tiny twitch in his mother’s face right before she swung around and pulled open the drawer to grab her favorite whip, silence.

Not, of course, the majestic silence of nature that fills one with awe in a black night with a million stars winking overhead, but the peevish silence of humans, who most often cannot shut the fuck up, but who manage to clam up completely when it is most important for them to nod and say something as simple as “nice.”

 We are a competitive, often vicious, species and there is little benefit, except sometimes in the moment, to give another person any reason to feel courage or hope.  One more reason a true friend, an indispensable ally in the war of each against all, is so rare.