You have heard of it I suppose.
Perhaps you have done it too.
Perhaps it was you.
You hoped beyond any reasonable hope that if they JUST KNEW…
They would care too.
They would act.
They would protect the vulnerable.
They would courageously “cherish the whistleblower.”
“Truth,” you believe, “would prevail.”
The wronged would be righted.
The lies would languish.
The truth would flourish.
After years of self blame,
loathing and shame,
years of loss and pain,
you screwed up the courage to tell —
while carrying the harbinger of hope
in the backpack of brutality
that holds secrets names.
You rattle and shake and fracture in front of them.
Your knees knock — the ones he tore apart.
Your hands violently tremble from the trauma you couldn’t stop.
Your voice cracks.
There is no turning back.
The deeds are told,
the air grows cold,
the young,
now old.
You lift your tired eyes to see the unseeing.
Nothing cuts off hope like telling the untold to the callous and cold.
—
There are very specific reasons why people cannot or will not see the truth about people they admire or even about themselves. When you wrap religion and any sort of “authority” around criminality/deviance — it is that much harder to help the unseeing world see.
There is a lot at stake for people to see — to come out of their #betrayalblindness. I hold the opinion that the time has not yet come for communities of faith to reckon with their own religious elite deviance and they may never.
This blindness is also enrobed in politic, while being blindfolded and bamboozled by a culture where the individual rights and freedoms fanboy the utterly insane and ardently admired. We are a LONG, LONG, LONG way from cherishing the #whistleblowers — we would rather run them through instead.
I continually ask myself what it means to be successful in the season that I am in.
It is sometimes a daily reminder that to embody justice is greater than getting it.
To believe is a bulwark in the face of disbelief.
To know and grow is better than to be blind to brutality.