This morning
I read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to get a Puritan perspective, and
thought how horrific it must have been for them to live in such fear and dread
of making the slightest misstep. Then, this afternoon, I had the opportunity to
think that if “the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the
flames gather and flash about them” (Baym 213) that this could be a wonderful
thing for some people.
My daughter
received a phone call with a girl screaming that a man had grabbed her. Then
the man got on the phone and said he had her daughter and if she wanted her
back that she had to take all of her money out of her account and wire it to an
account to Mexico. She signaled her fiancé, who unsuccessfully attempted to
call the friend where her daughter was visiting and then called the police. She
drove to the ATM, took out the cash, still talking to the “kidnapper,” and then
drove like a bat out of hell to the friend’s house. When she saw her daughter,
she just tossed her cellphone to the police. This scam is not uncommon and is
known as virtual kidnapping. The local police turned the information over to
the FBI, and they will be contacting her.
Tonight, I
wish I believed in hell. It would be easier if I knew that this amoral,
heartless son-of-a-bitch was going to burn forever for what he put all of us
through. Did he ever stop and put himself in the parents’ position? Is he
completely psychotic? Does he rationalize his actions by thinking this is okay
because no one is physically hurt and that it is just a scam? It didn’t feel
scam-like. It felt soul-crushing. Is this why the concept of hell was developed?
It almost sounds like telling your children, “You don’t have to worry about that
bad man, honey, the bogey man will get him when he least expects it.” Perhaps
it is to allow good people to continue functioning without mentally getting
lost in the need for some form of retribution.
When my
ex-husband was in college, he and three roommates rented a house and promptly
let all the grass and trees die. Years later, we rented out our house, paid the
water bill and had all of the grass on a sprinkler system. The renters, as you
now expect, turned off the sprinkler system and killed everything. They were
also making meth. The house and the garage were so covered in the by-product of
this endeavor that the sheriff’s department declared it would require a $250,000
hazardous materials clean-up. I remember lying in bed late at night, neither of
us sleeping, and my husband saying, “This is my fault. This is my karma, and
the law of ten-fold return for killing everything at that rental house when I
was in college.” This is what happens when a Catholic gives up Catholicism but
still accepts all of the guilt. Honestly, that isn’t very fair since guilt is a
great motivator for me as well.
My dad and I
had a challenging relationship. He was in World War II and saw horrific action,
but came home physically whole with the exception of acquiring jungle rot on
his feet that hurt and itched every day. Like many of his generation, he came
home looking for the promised brightest of futures. For several years, it
appeared as of he found it. Then things started going badly. My oldest sister
became very ill, requiring 42 blood transfusions and running such a high fever
that she died a few times before coming back to life. My other sister was badly
burned in an accident, requiring being salt water floatation until they could
do skin grafts. After that, my mom had a series of miscarriages. Dad’s parents
died. His favorite brother had a heart attack, and when my dad got to the hospital,
there was no sign of him. He searched that hospital until he found his brother,
dead and stuffed into a janitor’s closet. He had died in transit, and the small
emergency room had been overwhelmed, so they just put him out of the way.
Finally, I
was one of three baby girls born in that same hospital on a hot, summer day. All
three of us sickened with hours, unable to digest anything. The first died
within a few weeks. The second lived until she was 19, never able to process
the necessary nutrients from food to the point where she was wheelchair-bound, mentally
and physically handicapped. Me? My mom took me to Children’s Hospital
immediately. She’d been there enough and knew a sick kid when she saw one. For
two and half years, they did tests and surgery, and wanted to start more when
she stopped the treatment and took me home. She had studied herbs and vitamins
in the interim, and had come up with her own treatment plan. By this point, our
house was overrun with kids including his own children, nieces and nephews, and
one of the abandoned neighbor kids. My dad took a stand. About me. “Let this
one go,” he told my mom. “We have saved all the others. Let this one go.” My
mom didn’t agree. She began using an eye-dropper to give me goat’s milk mixed
with herbs while dad started using a coffee cup to measure his whiskey.
Dad was a
handsome, brilliant, charismatic man – outside of the house. He was a successful
business owner, working six days a week, he served on the local school board
for nineteen years, and was important in the B.P.O. Elks, Lodge 1625 (odd how I
remember that) and the American Legion. For the time period, he was
progressive, hiring workers who were smart and hard-working, completely discounting
their race, color, and histories. His employees were devoted and adored him for
this. One of his brothers was deaf, so dad signed fluently. Customers would
come from other states just to do business with him. He was a great father to
my sisters for most of their childhoods. I saw occasional signs of all of this,
but I never knew that man. For most of my childhood, he was the alcoholic I
avoided. I was seven or eight when I discovered the true purpose of slats on
the underside of the bedframe: they were there so kids like me could crawl
under the bed and then pull themselves up to the bottom of the slats to hide.
So, while this
was rather convoluted, it does touch on guilt. When dad was dying, I drove him
for radiation treatments five days a week. His feet hurt. I bought him three
pairs of slipper-shoes, trying to make him more comfortable. This upset my mom.
“What are you doing? Nothing is going to help.” I explained to her that I had
set a three-pair limit because I didn’t want to wake up in ten years and ask
myself if I couldn’t have bought my dying father a comfortable pair of shoes. Three
pairs. That, in my mind, was the magic number. She shook her head, but I knew I
just didn’t want to have that guilt hanging over me.
Today,
I don’t want to hear that the scam artist had a rough childhood, was deprived of
a positive father-figure in his life or the succor of religion. Not today. Today,
I just want the FBI to find this asshole and remove him from society. Period. I
know it isn’t likely that they will find him. I also know not to expect
justice. I was intimately involved in a court case when I was young, and
learned that there is no justice, only a mass of often-conflicting laws. I
think of Justinian I, the Eastern Roman Emperor, who took all of the Roman laws
and directed that they be sorted and rewritten in a logical manner in 529 CE.
Can we do this again? It isn’t as if all the law books would have to be
re-printed. We could just publish them electronically. It took them four years
with ink and parchment, so I’ll give them eight years with computers and
internet (and yes, there is a logic there). Of course, this would lessen the
need for nearly as many lawyers, so they would never let this happen. I was on
a senatorial community panel for the Affordable Care Act. I asked why we couldn’t
just have nationalized health care, and the response was that the lawyers
absolutely would not permit it. Okay, now that I’ve written this many words, I
acknowledge that the best I can hope for is that my daughter and her family
puts this behind them in a healthy manner, and that I can educate enough people
about this scam that it becomes an ineffective tactic. I’m just going to
conclude with my favorite quote, attributed to Flannery O’Connor: “I write
because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
Work Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment