Moral Injury

I almost posted this on Facebook, but I don’t want to use Facebook for anything confessional anymore. THIS is my confessional.

This article outlines perfectly what I have been struggling with since Trump’s first term.

It’s not just feeling powerless seeing what is being done in the name of this country, the harm being committed, knowing it is MY country and MY President and MY Congress and MY Supreme Court that are committing these evils and no, I didn’t “vote for this,” I voted the “right way,” the way “good people” vote, except that the Democratic Party is also a morass of elitist, rich, selfish, lazy bastards who suck the dick of the status quo. They just believe that if you keep people in new houses and credit cards and iPhones, all their little pet interest groups will stay complacent enough to keep drooling away on social media and patting ourselves on the back and watching the trending streaming shows and voting them in over and over.

It’s not just that. It’s also knowing that I am a part of the Elitist, Classist Machine that was fucking the poor, the rural, and the working class by convincing them they have no value in society, while those people did the same thing to the people they think are shitting all over them—the “others,” the urban, the educated, the queer, the differently-pigmented.

Yes, I am part of it. NEARLY everyone on “MY SIDE” is, especially anyone who sees nothing problematic at all about the Clinton presidency, who voted Obama without looking at his Congressional voting record (sorry, y’all, it kind of sucked), or who STILL thinks Nader or Bernie are the reasons “we" lost elections.

We all shit all over people who are “stupid.” And this was long before they made their inner thoughts known on the internet (GOD, WHY DID THE INTERNET EVER HAVE TO HAPPEN?) and voted this maniac into office. Yes, “stupid” people. The people who had fewer options. The people whose home lives were chaos. The people who didn’t have a college fund or had to work to support their parents’ families or just had shitty luck or maybe made shitty choices. Or MAYBE their mines went away, or their factories, because Progress doesn’t stop for stupid people.

And MY SIDE absolutely refuses any avenue of self-reflection because WE GOOD, THEY BAD. Yes, they are. And so are we, for different reasons. We won’t blow up the world and we are kind to the lowly. We just don’t include poor whites among them. How about all the Hispanics and Black people who voted Trump? Will we let them back in the clubhouse? When will we decide that we were better people before we had a means to render judgment (not Biblical, naturally, but that makes us even more SUPERIOR, because only STUPID people reference the Bible while judging others), but maybe not that much better. Because we still believed there were two kinds of people: college-prep, and SHOP students.

I know a lot of this comes from a. being raised Catholic and practicing self-examination as a sacrament and b. spending 20 years in 12-steps and practicing self-reflection as a means to stay sane. I self-reflect. I know what I did. I know what we all did. When will I hear anyone else admitting it? We all blame Trump and his voters for allllll of this, and in a forensic way, you fucking bet it’s their fault. But the shit sandwich was being prepared 50 years ago, in the 70s, when the middle class decided the lower class needed to be shut up for good and began the long business of political disenfanchisement that Trump figured out how to torpedo. And boy did he.

People want to feel like they have a right to exist. We are living with the results of decades of telling certain people they don’t, just as they became corrupted by their need to feel superior by doing the same, to others. The targets and methods were different, but not the moral violence.

I know as well as anyone that the cruelest among us are now in charge, and that even if “our” people hold hatred in our hearts, we usually at least try to ACT respectful and kind (though, like me, many are issuing wishes for the deaths of others on the daily, possibly for the first time ever).

But. I feel a moral injury. I feel moral despair. Not just because I watch helpless as some of the cruelist people on the planet attempt to kill us up and get rich selling our meat, but because I know what I did. And I know that if we don’t all fucking grow balls, look at ourselves, and get real honest and humble, we are well and truly fucked.

Before you accuse me of being an apologist, also understand this—I am grappling with the realization that my “Free to Be You and Me,” Sesame Street, post-Vatican-II-Catholic worldview is almost certainly wrong. I have always thought that basically, all people are good. That people who act “badly” (small word for a big umbrella) do so because they’re sick, or because of some genetics gone wrong, or because they grew up in the line of fire. I extended this on the extreme end to violent criminals, murderers, even abusers. I believed in redemption, I believed everyone who is mentally fit to (ie, not brain-deficient in some way) could work to redeem themselves from… anything, really. Yes, I believed that.

But what about Hitler? But what about Stalin? But what about…… I always conceived of those outliers, even when the outliers were legion, as aberrations of psychosis. Narcissism become sociopathy. The madness of crowds. Or the evil of institutions/systems. I never blamed the individual, only the system. On the individual level, all hardened positions hide unmet needs, no matter how exotic or criminal.

Evidence has been mounting for a long time that I am wrong. I knew there were pedophiles in the world, but thought of them as lonely men with a horrific mental illness. But now I know that vast rings of men who trade child murder porn actually exist. That there are people who really do want to wipe out entire civilizations. That there are people who hate so deeply as to be inexplicable.

And now that I know these things… well, no, it doesn’t nullify everything I said before. It just makes it all more complex, and more terrifying. I find myself wishing I believed in God, that that would provide some framework for all this so that I wouldn’t feel it so deeply. But that wish is part of the problem, isn't it? Because it often provides the justification for the easy answers, and leaves the stuff no one wants to look at buried, yet again.