Abuse in the Home and Community

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“May you live all the days of your life.” 

Jonathan Swift, rationalist poet: (1667-1745)

Physical and mental abuse, from my parents and four brothers, declined as I grew bigger. Shortly after I moved away as a teenager, and was trying to process my life, I reasoned: If I have my arms and legs chopped off and have to live with daily help, then I would be better off in a hospital among strangers than in my family where the abuse would surely return.

In that first sunrise year on my own, thinking of adventuring to Asia, I read about certain regions where there was a culture of mother-in-laws being abusive, the wife growing older, and then deflecting that torment from her mother-in-law… not back up upon the mother, but down onto their own daughter-in-law, like an evil chain reaching down the generations. I thought: How exotic.

Here’s what I recently found on social media: A mother-in-law had died. Her side of the family cried at the funeral, but the daughter-in-law was dry eyed. The others rudely condemned her for not grieving. Coldly she told her critics something like, “Early in my marriage, she had been terribly abusive. Totally unsupportive. Maybe in her older years you saw her being nice, but that was only because I was no longer within her power.” On the comment thread, many folks said the wife would be just as bad if she had power over her own daughter-in-law. I thought: How cynical.

Perhaps commenters assumed everyone would pass their misery onto anyone who was close at hand. Recently, in the US, where students have died from hazing, an expert explained that students who have been hazed feel impelled to be hazers in their turn. But there’s hope: British boarding schools, before Grandfather’s time, had horrible bullying. I think Rugby was the school that first broke the chain, when the headmaster would meet with the senior boys, bringing out their better natures.

Modern kids like Marvel comics where being a hero means having enough self control to obey laws and good cultural norms, even when they don’t have to. After all, if Superboy barges into the front of the queue, no student can physically carry him to the back of the line. Civilized self control hearkens back to the days of the knight errant. And cowboys. As Louis L’amour mused, most cowboys had read Ivanhoe; women could safely ride the range alone.

Today my town surely includes a family whose kids believe in abuse, and in bullying kids at school. This while —and the testimony of students is overwhelming— the teachers are useless, as they either ignore the physical bullying or blame the victim. Still, a child may choose to be a hero.

Children, families and entire cultures, in certain times and places, may believe abuse to be the natural order of things. Artists, then, who would dare question their culture must use metaphors: like Rod Serling entering the Twilight Zone, Jonathon Swift with the travels of Gulliver, and the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Kirk and Spock, in Plato’s Stepchildren, come across a dozen adults wearing togas who have super powers. The one with the most power rules, just as powerful Zeus ruled the family of Olympians. The poor guy at the bottom of the pecking order is Alexander, who is not great at all. When the pair from Starfleet Academy state that abuse is not natural, Alexander is amazed. He cries, “It’s them! All this time I thought it was me, but it’s them!” Kirk prepares a syringe, like the bite of a radioactive spider, offering to give Alexander the most power of all the Stepchildren. “No.” He doesn’t want to be like those he has come to despise. At that moment, I think Alexander achieves his greatness.

As for societies in times and spaces here on Earth, feminists say, “The personal is the political.” 

I was in London. A young man from Asia asked me why his small corner of the continent had little democracy… I silently mused: The more equality minorities and daughters have, the harder it is for a dictator to oppress the majority. But if the majority allows the oppression of others, then their own lives become more precarious. Aloud I said, “No middle class.” He later checked with his relatives and told me they agreed.

Back here in North America, if that clear eyed wife hated her “nice” mother-in-law then it was partly because she suspected if her mother-in-law was ever granted power then she would change into a crazy supervillain.

Now, I wouldn’t dare tell that wife, or my teenage self, they are mistaken. But my adult self notes that while my elderly parents would show sparks of evil right up until they died, they were decent people, and I can say that my adult brothers today don’t have unkind words for anybody. Knowing that, I feel saner.

Early one night in the bar, a wife-and-mother who grew up with abuse asked me, desperately concerned, “How can I know? How can I tell if I am being abusive?”

I replied: “I have been thinking long and hard about a guiding principle I recently came across—a principle independent of any culture, for any space and time—Anything that is not nurturing is abuse.” 

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Sean Crawford

Calgary

September

2023

Source: Louis L’Amour: His Life and Trails by Robert Phillips, page 35-36, paperback.