Having Survived Kokomo and The White Trash Diva

 I played lawyer for the very last time in my life this past Wednesday. It had to do with my trust. For three years, I have been trying to get a fix on assets and values. I go that much.

I filed a complaint before the hearing in two different courts. There is something on electronic filing service that I have not looked at. That is for tomorrow.

Neither of my sisters knew what was in the trust. No one had received any information from the trustee.

The taxi got me there hours early. So early, I needed more calories. I found a place called MoJoes on the east side of the courthouse. My Lenten fast got broken there. Another annoyance for me, along with the $140 it took me to get there.

My youngest sister had no great concern about any of this. Yet, she showed up at the hearing on Wednesday. She did not speak to me. Her attentions were focused solely on my step-sister.

I left with some clarity on the trust, and I got more on my relatives. I was wrong about the issue of stacks, but then, too, I think the Trustee's pleading might have been clearer. (An aside: no one has written anything in this case as clearly as I would have - a sign I interpret as hiding by indirection.)

Sitting at the northeast corner of the courthouse square, smoking a cigarette, I noticed she came out of the courthouse with her daughter. I did not see her walk past, only my niece. Then I realized my sister was hiding from me. She constitutes too large an object for easy concealment.

I got up to speak to her. She began walking away. Her daughter - middle 30s - came raging, yelling from a good twenty feet away that I was not to speak to her mother. She added that I had disrespected my father and my stepmother (she said her grandmother, but my mother was dead long before she was born, so I will assume my stepmother.) The fatal flaw in her hectoring was I could hear her without making out her words. All I had said to my sister was she needed to visit her cousin.

My niece's performance led me to think of her now as the white trash diva. All emotion, not much sense. Much righteousness about matters beyond her understanding, or responsibility.

It has been long decades since anyone has called me self-righteous. I think it was around Fourth Grade when I repeated some derogatory words of my mother's mother about neighbor children in my mother's presence. She gave me a thorough dressing down. More importantly, she got me thinking.

Later in life, I had a high school teacher I respected tell me not to think I knew everything, and met Socrates. It is learning how much we do not know that marks an education. Some of my other teachers - Thoreau, Nietzsche, Emerson, William James, John Stuart Mill, Sir Francis Bacon, and David Hume - made the same points. Church had its part to play there, too.

Family members have called me arrogant. I realized this past Wednesday, it is that I do not accept their moral superiority and the judgments that flow from that superiority. Bumptious and impatient is how I think of myself - when I am not calling myself a moron.

I remember the pursed lips, the inability to look in my direction, or having the courtesy of speaking to me of not only my blood kin but the relations brought into my life by my father's marriage. It is the same look of sanctity that has been passed down from the ages. I do not wish to sound like a misogynist, but it is one that I have seen more common among women than men. Maybe they get it from the movies - what I saw in the Howard County Courthouse resembled the scene in Stagecoach where the local purity squad is driving Claire Trevor out of town. They all shared a moral superiority over me. They all looked unhappy, and they gave off the impression of all having been weaned on pickles, which seems to me to have justified with hunts and lynchings. They are the pure, the righteous. In other places and times, they have sewn swastikas onto uniforms and collected stones for the village stoning, and gathered faggots for the heretics' barbeque.

My temper flared but remained under control. However, it did not go out. What happened is it exhausted me. I did not sleep well for two nights. The behavior that I found so rancid from my own relatives brought me closer to an episode of depression than I have had since 2010 or 2009. That I was exhausted by the end of the whole episode weakened my control is what brought me close to a crisis. I am glad I am taking my Zoloft.

The episode raises also questions of nature versus nurture. Everything I can tell of my son who was adopted is that he is a well-adjusted family man with a stable job and marriage; no signs of a need for performative vile behavior. None of that can be said of my youngest sister's children. I feel more and more that I saved the boy from life soiled by my sister's behavior. 

It also gives me ideas on how some in the wider world think think. Not that I know my sister's politics. I suspect they are whatever her friends think is proper without any reflection on her part as to the wisdom or utility of those views. I used rancid above because that is what I think all self-righteous ends. In the end, self-righteousness can only destroy what it thinks is inferior: Jews for Nazis; Native Americans for George Armstrong Custer; African-Americans for the KKK; Dalits for Brahmins; and the list goes back to the beginning of history. They want that destruction even if they have lived lives of parasites, have had no ambition other than feeding their faces, and have contributed nothing constructive to their societies.

Saturday morning I listened to NPR's On The Media's  LISTEN Meet the Media Prophets Who Preach Christian Supremacy. Plus, Journalism in ‘Civil War’. As an Orthodox Christian, I find nothing Christian about this kind of thinking. I would have thought the same during the decades I remained aloof from the church. Christianity is not about political or religious supremacy. It is about imitating Christ's humility.

For our pride to admit that we are worse and more insignificant than others means committing suicide. Therefore it does not allow us to tell the truth about ourselves. It continually keeps us in our self-delusion, forcing us to give our qualities a higher mark. Who of us can say with all our hearts these words: “I am nothing; I am the worst, the least of all”? Very few, although one may be the worst criminal. And this means that humility, humility of wisdom is as far from us as the earth is from the heavens.

If we wish to be true Christians, then we should try with all our strength to rouse in ourselves the spirit of Christian humility and the striving to serve others. In order for us to love humility and not think that it can degrade us but to the contrary, understand that it serves for our exaltation, we should always remember that pride is hateful to both the Lord and our neighbor, while humility attracts the good will of both God and man, and the Lord has forthrightly promised a reward for it.

The podcast above makes a point of the dangers Christian nationalism poses for the country and for our democracy. They fear the loss of their power as a supposed majority. The "supposed" is mine. I do not think they represent the majority of Christians, I do not think they represent Christian theology. They are the small-minded; because the small-minded are easily frightened and cling hard to their supposed prerogatives. They are the ones who shroud themselves in the cloak of their self-righteousness. Those proud of their righteousness deem the rest of humanity expendable. They have done that from the death of the first person they cast out as a heretic.

Strange to think I have a relative like that. Is the difference just education? Or is it that I selected from a different view? Or is it our interpretation of the same data that differs?

From a practical standpoint, I am not sure that the familial issues are all that important. Once this trust business is over, our twain shall never meet again. A failure for both of our parents, but not one I care any longer to mend. My own concern is far more personal - am I forgiving trespasses, and does forgiving trespasses require me to embrace what I find antithetical to a healthy remainder of my life?

The greater danger is to what extent these self-righteous types, with their faith in having God (or whatever be their source of morality) on their side, certain in all their judgments endanger the lives of others. These are people of Margaret Atwood's Gilead; of Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On—"; the people who built Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago; the people who gave smallpox-laden blankets to the Native Americans.

I have seen enough vileness in my life. Participated in too much, too. At my most nihilistic, I believed there was nothing that could be done. I think now the self-righteous are too destructive to humanity, and we must resist those who would destroy the world to justify their own existence, who would level us all down to their level of joylessness. Whether there is a future for our species may be an open question, but the time remaining for humanity can be better spent than living under the dictatorship of those who fear looking up from the mud to see the stars.

I spent the rest of my time in Kokomo at their public library. It is a nice place, but I thought it was small compared to Anderson's. I had problems with keeping their wi-fi connection open, and I had trouble with my cell phone. This left me without much in the way of communications, and an uncertainty on how to get back home. I kept feeling more and more exhausted. Finally, I got through on the phone to a taxi company.

Walking out, I noticed a vending machine at the entrance. Not sure what I was seeing, I stopped for a closer look. It was for possible drug overdoses. 

I keep asking this - why is it we do not ask why we have a market for illicit drugs? We blame the dealer, but the dealer is only providing what the market desires. What is it about our society that so many people need the protection and solace of a chemical blanket? We have been too self-righteous to ask that question.

The taxi driver and I talked the way to Muncie - food and electric cars and the life in Kokomo. He got me back here around 6:30. It cost me $120.00.

I was in bed by 7 pm. Tired, but sleep did not come for hours. 

At least, I can say I knew more than I did about the trust business than I did on Tuesday. Then, too, I survived my niece, the white trash diva.

On the other hand, it has taken me 4 days to write this report.

sch 4/21