Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Who will defend them?

I remember the moment quite vividly. I don't remember what I did to cause the moment, honestly, and I would tell anyone if I did remember.

But I remember the aftermath ... for a couple of reasons. I remember the difficulty I caused -- the tears on my mother's face, the tears on my own face, When my father returned from where ever on the planet he was,  he certainly did not cry, but he let me know his feelings, and I cried again. I was not yet 10 years of age, and I was causing grief and producing guilt.  And I was ripping down branches, tearing off leaves and as much of tiny protrusions as I could because they hurt the worst. N6i                  

Comedian Bill Cosby describes his own moment this way: My wife grabs a yard stick... holds it like a samurai warrior... and announces that the beatings will now begin... by saying, "I HAVE HAD... ENOUGH OF... THIS!" Now these three brain-damaged people have the nerve to looked surprised."

Richard Pryor, years ago, used to talk about having to go get a switch (a cruel punishment in an of itself). In the routine, Pryor talked about a switch, which is a Southern connective word like cornbread or grits that when said produces head shakes from men sitting in Southern rocking on Southern wood porches on hot Southern evenings, He talked about the sound the switch would make as it was "whipped" through the air, slicing through the Southern humidity like a wooden missle. Perhaps the fear of the sound was almost the equal of  the fear of what a thin branch of a tree would do to us.

Unless, of course, one had a father like Adrian Peterson apparently is. I had one like that, one who would whip you not just into punished state but into state of submission, whose use of the thin whippet was a talent not unlike the orchestra leader in front of the band. These fathers played a tun on the legs of many a boy growing up. Anyone who would try to make the argument that corporate punishment does not work was never whipped like that. I'm not arguing for it. I'm simply saying one did not choose to have freaking fear driven out of every pore like sweat on a Mississippi summer night.

But it wasn't the somewhat infrequent whippings from my father that created "the moment." Nah. That would be all too easy to understand. 

Indiscretion begat beating begat pain, begat corrective decision. That makes some sense, right? It does work. But what it doesn't do is fix the one doing the wrong. It simply replaces the wrong with fear, and that's not a way to live.

The moment, the type of moment I am describing, the devastating moment I have lodged some where in my brain, came because I did something that caused my mother distress, and the fact that she made me go get the dang switch. It was very much like forcing the prisoner to get a truck and go get the electric chair to do the damage. 

One step beyond okay, if I was asked. 

Look, I get the arguments. I understand that in the hands of an NFL player a switch becomes something different than a mere tool of discipline, and he should be punished accordingly. I even hear the argument that in some ways this is between a father and a son, making it little of my business.

But the thing I remember most about that day so long ago in the yard of our house in Lizelia, Miss., is something completely different. What I remember most are the tears... and the screams.

If we won't defend these children, these women, then who will? Don't we have an obligation?

1 comment:

kevin h said...

Adrian Petersen is himself a man-child, a simple sort of man in many ways. I suspect he was just doing what he knew, what he experienced in his own rough upbringing. That doesn't make it OK, and can easily join in the righteous (perhaps sometimes overly righteous) chorus of those who disapprove of his action. I pity the poor child(ren) above all, because of the fear you express so vividly. But I can't quite bring myself to vilify the man-child who committed the act. I rather think Adrian just needs to know better so he will do better. I hope so, anyway.