How do you trust someone you
harmed unforgivably? Even if they say
they’ve moved on (because, really, what else can one do? Otherwise the aggressor steals the future as
well as the past) you know you could never get over it. So you don’t believe them.
White America and slavery. Europe and American tribes. A sixth of us are children of Africans who
were kidnapped, raped, tortured, treated as things. Of course Blacks are scary. How could they forgive that? What revenge are they planning? I am Jewish and haven’t been able to make
myself visit Germany. Yet the survivors
of this continent’s holocaust have nowhere to go. If I were they, of course I’d be planning to
get my own back.
And Hillary. It isn’t about the policy and the politics
because if it had been a man in the same role the explanations would make sense
and we’d objectively parse her out, around the 65th percentile, left
of Obama but right of Bernie and still well left of even the Democratic
median. We’d acknowledge that the one
area a woman in national politics HAS to overperform to make a nationally
credible run is in a show of military toughness.
It’s Monica. We wouldn’t forgive and we don’t believe she
did. But she’s still married to the
horndog, so what does that mean? Is it
about family and a child and being a village and greater good? Is it a sign of personal ambition that will
accept even that humiliation, so what other horrors does it accept? Or is it the calculated indifference of a
political mechanic? Or—why doesn’t this
narrative surface—the stoic public face of None of Your Damn Business?
She is going to have to talk about
it. I am so sorry because she shouldn’t, any more than you would go up to a
friend and say, well, what do you think of slavery, how do you feel about not
being able to live where your ancestors lived, happy Yom HaShoah. That is ridiculous. We know what the answer is. Pain, rage, sorrow, a deep and permanent
wound.
Yet until she shows hers you
aren’t going to trust her.
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