To (sort of) quote the late, great, astounding, and wonderful genius scientist/philosopher Steven Toulmin, "If Plato, Aquinas, Freud, and the Jesuits have anything in common, it is that, well, how these things get started is how they go on for the entirety of one's existence."
What he was talking about was how one is raised is what one becomes. It is painfully difficult to try to see how the habits of all of us will be changed by all this. Look, we have had the bulk of our lives nurtured and formed within the social world. Maybe this time of having all families and children will have a good effect. Hey! I sincerely hope so! But it is for the rest of us, the one's who have had our corporeal reality and habits altered, that I wonder what in the living hell is going to happen?
I am banking hard on what I have seen through prior generations. I was a landscaper at a cemetery for 13 years. In the first half of that life, there was an old Polish man who worked part-time. He was a nice guy, but his English was not great. Still, I liked him and no one was against him. He just worked and spoke in broken English.
Years later, during my last year there (a decade long relapse that became both a Divine gift and joke), I found out that he was a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor. I had vague memories of him telling me about dragging carts of bodies to an oven and screaming at officers, but he told me those stories ONCE a decade prior. There was no context. I found out that he had died after falling into dementia, with the memories of the Holocaust still burning him. That being said, he had lived through literal hell and, for years, I had no idea.
Perhaps we shall be silent about this time, just gloss it over with an, "Oh, yes, well, that WAS a time,..." and never speak about the darkness and uncertainty that was within these days. I am NOT saying this is anything close to the horrors of WW2 or otherwise! All I am saying is that I am curious to see how we will tell this tale of what will most likely be over one hundred thousand deaths within our country.
For the record, let me say this:
I sincerely wish that the old Polish man who was in the concentration camps told me everything that he ever felt and everything that ever happened. All I got to see was the horror of hell in his eyes one day during his very very very brief impromptu confession and it changed my life. He did nothing wrong except survive. In the end of his life, I was told by a relative, he was haunted by dreams and waking visions and fears of Nazis coming to kill him. perhaps if he had told his full story, the demons would have had no power against him.
May we have the grace, strength, and integrity to tell the absolute truth of all this. And we are barely in the beginning moments of this plague.
If you want to get a tattoo, get it now and get it for this.
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