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Order this writing in the collection book Breaking Silences available for only 1650 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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SCALES
Mel Waldman
How do I balance Father’s madness with Mother’s love?
Acts of terrorism begin behind closed doors at home.
The first terrorist I knew was Father. I knew him intimately.
Cannibal that he was, he ate my soul for dinner each night.
Mother sat quietly and looked away in denial or fear.
How do I balance Father’s madness with Mother’s flawed love?
What are the rights of a terrorist? (How do I atone for the sins of
my father?) What are the rights of a terrorist suspect? (How do I
escape Father’s web of evil?) What am I if I terrorize the terrorist
or the terrorist suspect? Shall I become the object of my venom?
Father bestowed upon me his dark raw rage, passing it through my
fragile being in a ferocious emotional contagion and it metastasized
into a million wild fragments, unforgivingly, feverishly, in a wilderness
where evil was born-in my Garden of Eden.
Mother, always the optimist, fed me love and faith and visions of a
beautiful future, never seeing the slithering snake nearby. But Father
reminded me I was his dark son and he force-fed me his rage. Made me
swallow it. And I believe that Father’s most heinous act-his rape of my
soul-removed my skin of innocence and the last vestige of hope and redemption.
The universe spits rage at us and tips the scale of love and hate. How do we
balance it?
The galaxy launches good and evil at us, filling our human bodies with
the forces of light and darkness.
The cosmos rushes forth with nature’s truth. But humans run with
truth and lies, often addicted to self-deception, afraid to balance
the Scale of Truth.
So many scales to balance...
Our president wants to strip terrorist suspects of habeas corpus,
cutting off their umbilical cord to humanity. And he craves
new powers to delineate the parameters of interrogation
of these individuals, who are still, in fact, innocent
until proven guilty, according to our Constitution,
and human beings too-not animals-nor terrorists
nor mass murderers nor war criminals.
How do we balance the Scale of Justice?
Shall we forget the Detainee Treatment
Act and the Geneva Conventions?
(Father used to torture me every
day with little restraint and not
even Mother could stop him
from severing my soul and
mind.)
Shall we permit cruel and inhuman
treatment of terrorism detainees?
(When I was a young Brooklyn
boy, parents had the right to
physically abuse their
children in the name
of character
development.)
Shall we violate the Geneva Conventions
and torture our prisoners in secret camps
where human rights do not exist?
(When I grew up in Brooklyn,
children had no rights, it
seemed.)
If we do not bar cruel and inhuman treatment...
If we torture our prisoners, what will happen
to our POWs? What will the Enemy do?
How do we balance the Scales of Justice
and Morality?
The landscape of our beautiful country is
contaminated with human debris and
paranoia.
In the beginning, Father accused me of minor
crimes. Later on, his accusations spread like
a malignant tumor. He falsely claimed I
was guilty of more serious criminal acts
and finally-unspeakable crimes I never
committed.
I shook in his presence. I wanted to kill him for
raping my soul. With truth and sincerity, I told
him I was innocent.
“Confess! Confess!” he screamed at me. “I
know you did it!”
I never confessed. And the torture never ceased.
Even after Father’s death, I’m still in prison
(a lonely interior landscape apparently
painted by Bosch and Munch), an
innocent man guilty of feeling
terror, and nothing more.
Now, I sit in my cell and study the darkness.
So many scales to balance...within and out
there- where human minds and flesh are
tortured and human souls die every
moment from injustice,
vanishing into
oblivion,
as if
they
never
were.
