The Passive Enablers of Fascism Are the Ones I Hate the Most
Everyone thinks it "takes two to fight" until they get punched in the mouth
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I recall my dad's sister. She was a teacher and she liked to stylize herself as the embodiment of “propriety.” She'd bore us all with long lectures that contained every cliché you can imagine.
“Violence is never the answer.”
“If you have a disagreement, come and ask an adult.”
“Bad people will be held accountable.”
I'd be forced to sit and listen to this because I was a powerless child. Then I'd get into a situation where one of the pack of rats she gave birth to started beating on me. The worst of them was 11 years older. He was the kind of 17 year old who wanted to get as much child abuse in as possible before he could be tried as an adult.
After one of these beatings, I went to talk to her. “You told me to come to an adult if something happened. You said violence is never the answer. You said bad people will be held accountable.”
She just looked at me through her glasses and down her nose.
“Well, your son beat the crap out of me for no reason, are you going to do anything about it?”
This is where the cowardice came in.
She'd give me that little smirk that all evil people are so proud of. It's the smirk that says they have all the power. It's the smirk that says you're a fool. It's the smirk that indicates they're not going to do a damn thing to help you.
Immediately after the smirk came the recrimination.
“Well, it takes two to fight.”
My jaw dropped open at this.
“That's always the case. There's not even a need to verify whether it applies in this case because it's always true. It's irrefutable. With only one person, there can't be a fight at all. Therefore, you share some of the blame, and it looks like you have already received what you deserved. So, why don't you go away and quit pestering me?”
Then she'd smirk again, nod sharply, and go back to stitching a swastika with needlepoint. She never finished the swastika though, she always stopped when it resembled a Catholic cross.
Again, I was a powerless kid. I didn't have the social standing to say, “But wait a minute. I wasn't doing anything. I was just walking along and this brutal adolescent attacked me out of nowhere. How could that possibly be my fault?”
Instead, all I could do was retreat and endure the injustice of it all. That's how the conditioning starts, and I think in one way or another we all get a dosage of that sort of treatment.
I truly believe that the world only consists of a very small amount of completely evil people. It also contains only a small amount of actively good people. The problem is the big group in the middle that can't make up their mind, so they sit around squawking, “Oh, it can't be that bad.”
Then they return to their needlepoint.
I'm dead sick of these people. As far as I'm concerned, the people who refuse to pick a side are actually worse than the people out there murdering and beating and abusing the innocent.
Anyone who briefly glances up from their needlepoint to see a 17 year old beating on a 6 year old, and does nothing other than mutter, “Boys...” in a semi-threatening tone, is an enabler to abuse.
That person might as well be beating on the child herself.
We live in a world where an unacceptable percentage of the population has conditioned themselves to take no notice of the evil that's all around. Instead of believing the evidence of their own eyes, they revert to something they were taught by a self-righteous and indifferent authority figure years ago.
“If you are in a fight you are equally responsible.”
What I should have done when I was six was pick up a paperweight and smashed her in the face with it. When she looked up through a broken lens, bleeding and in shock, I could say, “You're equally responsible for that.”
But of course, when it comes to them, they recognize how their premise is utter nonsense.
When it comes to them.
Our whole society rouses itself to inaction on the basis of statistically irrelevant scenarios.
“Well, it could be the case that both of you were wrong,” they say.
Yes, that could be true. In some instances it is true. But to assume it's always true and that alighting on that assumption means you don't have to go through the process of investigation is criminal.
Anyone who bases all their behaviors on the existence of a statistically improbable hypothetical reality is an enabler of evil. Full stop. Every time.
The reality was that all the “pooh-poohing” she did to dismiss the brutal behavior of her children was because she was too lazy and indifferent to make a stand for what is right.
The person giving the lecture should have been me, not her. She was an adult. It was her job to stop the cruelty of her obnoxious little brat children.
“Well, it can't be the case that my kids are completely at fault. Some of the fault must be yours. What did you do to provoke this?”
No you psychotic lunatic. You have to accept the hypothetical reality that your children are evil to the core.
Naturally, all of her kids grew up into adults who fervently supported a convicted felon and sex offender for president.
These days, when I try to complain to my fellow Americans that anyone who supports a person like that is evil, I hit that same look-down-your-nose/smirking resistance.
“Well, you can't say all. It can't be all of them. Don't use the word all.”
I'll damn well use the word all.
All rapists are evil.
All murderers are evil.
All child molesters are evil.
Are you going to sit there and give me a stern lecture in defense of any of those groups?
Here comes the smirk and the dismissive body language again. “Well, if you're going to be unreasonable,” they say.
This is the main issue confronting our society today. We've got a massive percentage of the population that has convinced itself it's righteous to do nothing. They are the passive enablers. They watch the crimes of history, go back to their needlepoint, and mutter, “both sides are wrong.”
The next thing they know, their house is burning down around them and they're screaming bloody murder.
This is the old lesson of the past that brought us to this crumbling dystopia.
The new lesson is that we need to rouse ourselves to unapologetically stand for justice. We can't allow these nefarious forces to pressure us into accepting an unfair resolution.
“Well, you could go forward with that accusation, but it's going to ruin that young man's life.”
No. Don't try to put this on me. If that young man didn't want his life ruined, he should have thought about how his actions were going to hurt others.
We've got to stop letting abusive and malicious people off the hook. They cry their alligator tears and demand the kind of mercy they never show to their victims. The indifferent arbiters of justice see the illusion of repentance, shrug, and use it as an excuse to abdicate their duties. In the end, the innocent are forced to pay again and again and again.
It has to stop.
Forget about the bad actors. They're never going to change. We can only oppose and punish them. What we have to do is turn our activism to shaming the people who support and enable the abuse. If you stand by and do nothing while a child is hurt, you are just as evil as the person performing the acts of abuse.
Don’t try to hit me with some passive, bullshit arguments as to why that’s not true. I’m done listening. I’m on the side of helping my fellow human beings. Where are you?
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You know what's even worse, the ones who look down on you just because you stand up for yourself and tell you that you deserved it. And - that they don't care and are not going to do anything about it. And even worse than that are the ones who tell you to just "forgive" your tormenters. As if!
Thanks Walter. Each of my children were the victims of abuse, at least once as grade schoolers. Both times my reporting went ignored and worse, laughed away, by all of the so-called adults in the room, and I'm the school system. My oldest finally punched the head bully, when nothing I did was helping his little brother. That ended the youngest son's school bus abuse. Also, once our older son (age 9), after 3 months of keeping quiet from fear, cried to me that the boy across the street (a 6 year old) attempted to perform a lewd act on him aggressively and in front of our other son. Not one person helped us in the school system, nor in the young boy's family. My sons were clearly upset, so we had them see a counselor to be evaluated, while the parents across the street, laughed at my concern.