Ideations of Violence
PART 1/6
I started having my first ideations of violence around the age of 9.
Not long before, I had gained my first exposure to the book, The Diary of Anne Frank.
Her vivid portrayal of the horrors of nazi Germany - its brutal brownshirts, its criminal gestapo, its evil secret police, all haunted my young imagination at night.
I lay there marveling that, at an age only slightly older than my own at that time, she had observed such awful atrocities firsthand.
I could see them playing out in my mind against the dark ceiling of my room again, and again, and again.
I imagined members of the nazi secret police breaking into the house to get me, and I practiced in my mind how I would respond.
I determined that it would be preferable to die combatting my enemies - enemies like the secret police - than to live in a manner that makes false peace with such authoritarian oppression.
As a child not yet ten years old, I knew that.
How to explain that I could relate to the work as something that could happen here, except to say I must have been taught that somehow?
Perhaps it was the series of encounters with school disciplinary procedures that I had been subjected to since the age of six for...what?
Asking questions the teacher didn't like to answer?
Just a question, teach.
Oh yes, I learned how wicked and conniving adults could be at a very, very young age.
Perhaps I have never fully trusted an adult yet so long as I have lived.
By many other means, the adults around me in Texas tried to unteach Frank's lesson of warning in favor of a placating, soothing lie: the myth of American exceptionalism.
The notion that somehow or other, that sort of base wickedness would never come to the United States of America; that lie familiar to the mass of cynics among you.
Within my own mind, however, the bell had already gotten rung, and no holocaust denier was ever going to unring it.
As an extension of the selfsame know-nothing logic that denies the possibility of secret police on American streets, school districts have banned that profound book from schools in districts from coast to coast on the claim that it's disturbing to young minds.
They wait until the children grow a little bit older than Anne Frank was when she wrote her extraordinary work before they allow them access to it in schools.
As if showing their own children a twelve-year old girl's potential for moral clarity might create too much trouble for them.
Thinking about the censorship of books in the United States makes me want to punch somebody.