Today, something happened that has never happened to me before. I was reading THIS WEEK news magazine and I read a column on the Portland demonstrations. A group of Portland Mothers made a protective guardian line to protect the protest marchers from assault. Armed militia clad in camouflage gear in unidentified vans, allegedly sent by the Federal Government attacked them. They shot the mothers with rubber bullets, giving one mother a fractured skull, and they tear-gassed them. The Veterans came to protect the mothers too and then the husbands formed a group and came with leaf blowers to blow away the tear gas and protect the mothers and the vets.
First, when I read that they had shot that unarmed and non-violent mother in the face with the rubber bullet, I spontaneously fell to tears -it just spilled out of me, a result I think, of an overflow tank of anxiety and fear and sorrow that has come about since the destabilization of our country from the pandemic, the obviously unstable and irresponsible president and his gang, and from the violence against citizens caused by our increasingly militarized police force.
Watching the end of the new series on the Russian Revolution, I saw this same hatred, and cold hearted violence when Marxists murdered village people suspected of giving horses to Leninist groups who stole the horses and burned down the peasants homes and fields. They lined up and shot whole families from the littlest, not even walking yet, to the oldest grandparents. Same thing in Germany, Poland, and Cambodia.
An elderly Cambodian woman my sister has worked with on the 'Meals on Wheels" food assembly line in Pa., told her than the Kmer Rouge attacked her village and slaughtered everyone except her. She was 5 years old. They killed her parents in from of her and disemboweled them. They left her there alone, stripped naked, amidst the dead bodies. I don't now how she got rescued, but she eventually made it to America.
You have to ask yourself who can do such things? And then, here we are in America and a camouflaged militia man shoots a Mom in the face with a rubber bullet and fractures her skull. She could have been his mom. What goes wrong with that individual man that he could do such a thing. No one made him shoot that older woman in the face. It is so hard to understand the "blind and ignorant thing"* in the heart that would allow someone to overcome their lifelong acculturation to protect elderly women, mothers and grandmothers, and actually shoot one in the face.
*The quote above came from a novel I used to teach when I was an English teacher. It was called A SEPARATE PEACE, by John Knowles. It was a classic coming of age novel set in World War II and it asked that very question, how could someone do such a dastardly thing and Knowles wrote that it was a blind and ignorant thing in the heart. I think of it more as a compartmentalization of the heart - a wall between what you know is right and what some barbaric and savage spurt of destructive impulse escapes and allows someone to do a savage act.
To think that an American man could shoot an American mother in the face with a rubber bullet - but then, too, to think an American policeman could kneel on an American man's neck until the life was crushed out of him, or to think that in an American town a mob of men could beat an American Man senseless and torture him and hang him until the life is strangled out of his body, it is too hard for me to accept.
Usually, at this point, I say "Happy Trails" but today it is a trail of sorrow. Sorry to drag you into my morning gloom, but I had to write this down to escape it. Usually I put these things into my daily journal which I have kept for more than 50 years, but increasingly I have come to talk to this blog in the same way.
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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