Which is what I was thinking at the time. A mistake in that endeavor would have made the cookie dough incident look like an Easter parade.
But my point is, they didn’t want it fixed. And when I tried to compensate, they didn’t want that either.
Yeah, that’s the part that I’d think would keep stinging. If your parents had simply been unable to afford fixing the water heater or buying sufficient clothes etc, and they’d cared, it would have been a totally different situation.
Two things come to mind from reading your harrowing tale:
- How absolutely fucked up the Just World Hypothesis really is, and
- Just how much “the hand we’re dealt” in the first X number of years of our lives really matters
There’s a Fred Rogers quote:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.
It’s nice. It’s sweet. It’s charming. It’s facile.
Not all damage done by horrible events or even worse people can ever be adequately remediated by the ‘people who are helping.’
I’m so sorry for the hand you were dealt. Living well really is the best revenge. I hope you’ve managed, and that you manage, to live well in spite of it all.
Yeah, but I try. I mean, maybe because of Mr. Rogers, maybe because of this, maybe just because, when there’s an emergency, I look for a secondary way to help. I know I can’t be the hero, but I can feed people, keep the children busy, clear a path for the EMTs, whatever. Better than standing around rubbernecking.
Yes. And, though not all the damage can be fixed – it still matters a very great deal that people try.
Of course not. And the Mr. Rogers bit is true. Not facile. It isn’t a just world. Duh. Bad things happen to good people. Horrible things. And there still are good people who try to do good anyway. The point isn’t that they are able to remediate the bad. Or that they can prevail. But that there are people who try to help even knowing that they can only make the bad a little bit less bad. People suck, sure, but not all people suck. Sure we can focus on how horrible many people are and how the damage can never be completely fixed and despair. But choosing to only see them is a choice. Seeing those who try to help helps avoid the abyss, and may even be aspirational. They don’t remediate all the damage. But they don’t do nothing either.
I’m not saying anything different, except …
I don’t know that our society recognizes clearly enough how valuable prevention really is. I would argue that our health care system … definitely doesn’t (to highlight but one example with which you’re intimately familiar).
It reminds me of a great speech by RFK at the University of Kansas:
Our society is shockingly, dramatically, and excessively built on perverse incentives:
- Crime and punishment
- Health and disease
- War and peace
- Substance abuse
- Environmental disasters
- Illegal immigration
- The for-profit “Angertainment” news industry
Maybe a paradigm shift could yield immense benefits that cascade throughout society.
Maybe.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.