The Boy

I had a troubling experience today.

I rode my bicycle to the convenience store a few minutes away. It's on a busy thoroughfare near where I live, so there was a line to the check out counter. I got in the line, because it's better than a shoplifting arrest, and this is what we do. The line was moving well, and I'm not impatient when it comes to these things. I was thinking about the piece of writing I was working on before I went to the store. Then, a voice started coming from behind me. It was clear, quickly, that they weren't speaking to me. They weren't speaking to anyone at all really, just kind of vocalizing their inner thoughts, if you will.

"This fucking country. Fucking cowards. Of course nobody cares about veterans. Cock sucking mother fuckers," followed by continuing variations on this theme. He was saying this, loud enough for everyone around him to hear it. It wasn't a mutter, but a conversational volume. I realized he was cuing off of the cashiers asking people if they wanted to donate to a charity for veterans day.

It went on, basically like that, for the few minutes as I waited in line. I thought about saying something to him, but what, really?  I can't argue that the US is a nation that's done well in keeping with its agreement with veterans. I don't think it has. I also don't think a convenience store line is someplace a substantive discussion on policy and budgets is going to happen, with an individual who is already so exorcised, he's just blurting out his sense of grievance and betrayal. It's just one of a cascading, compounding list of institutional failures, interconnected with many of those others .

I've lost my ability to be entirely comfortable in public settings of most kinds. Occasionally, the right musical performance, the right film, the right venue can help push that anxiety to the back of my experience with each moment. It's part of why I do things like focus on a piece of writing that's in progress on or wear headphones in the grocery store, as controlling the sensory input I can and giving my constantly running thoughts a specific thing to focus on helps. If not, I'm just kind of awash in an anxiety constantly surfing that sensory input for signs of a threat. I've come to believe it's an infernal intertwining of PTSD and autism. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's what I've got to work with, and where I used to ignore that reality, I've come to accept it, and as a result, tend to limit my time in public these days. Today, I was just taking the five minute ride, and didn't think to bring the headphones with me.

That being said, it won't shock you to know I was increasingly uncomfortable with this individual standing behind me, where I couldn't see him and keep an eye on him. When it got to the point I was the next in line for the register, I turned to him to offer him my position, also thinking maybe an act of kindness might interrupt his furious digging in his sense of betrayal and grievance. He was surprised, clearly. He also declined, and mumbled some reason, which I didn't quite catch, and didn't get a chance to inquire further about, as my turn at the counter came up. This is when I noticed he had a little boy with him, somewhere between seven and nine. I could be wrong, my exposure to children these days is limited, so my ability to gauge their age probably isn't so reliable. He as child though, and young.

There were two registers, so I stepped up to mine, and within a few seconds, he stepped up to the one next to it. As I completed my transaction, I couldn't help but overhear how his was progressing, because he intended everyone to. When it came time for the cashier to ask about donating to the veterans charity, he loudly said, "No. I am a veteran. As a matter of fact, I miss killing Muslims. I miss blowing up their buildings. I miss killing them. I wish I could do it here, not like the rest of these cock sucking cowards." The cashier, to her credit, completed the transaction as quickly as possible, without engaging this. He stepped away, headed to the door. My transaction was finished quickly after.

I turned away from the counter, and started toward the door, and there, with their backs turned to me, was this duo. The man, I now saw more clearly, a muscled brick of a human being. Not tall, but clearly a fan of the weights in the gym. His fists were clenched, his head shaking back and forth, visibly breathing heavily, and beside him, a little boy in shorts, a very typical oversized tee shirt and sneakers, about up to his elbow.

My mind had been skipping around, flashing on the many different varieties of interaction a man willing to behave this way is likely to have in the next few years, what the campaign and election of Donald Trump have empowered, the stresses of what the administrations policy decisions will bring, the conflicts that will arise from those decisions... he won't be spared any of burdens even as he believes those burdens are punishments others deserve, and then there is burden that he is, and will further become, heaved on people around him. I don't tell fortunes. I am good at identifying patterns though, and the patterns converging in this moment suggest the future is not going to be good for this man or many of the people who come into contact with him. I can't say I was shocked by his behavior. Perturbed? Discomfited? Yes, absolutely. Not shocked though. This is the kind of public life Christian white nationalists have envisioned and been fighting for, and because no one with any real power or influence could bring themselves to call that striped cat a tiger, they just sent their avatar, their figurehead to what is arguably the most powerful elected office on the planet.

All of that kind of slipped away for a second though. There was just a little boy, in his blue shorts, his oversized red shirt and his bright blue and white sneakers, head slightly down, walking at the elbow of the man I assume was his father, who was vibrating with vicious, admittedly homicidal, racist rage. From the time they were behind me to the time they walked out, the man never spoke to the boy. He was pretty clearly still surfing the wave of rage that had encouraged him to announce it when he climbed in his vehicle.

This picture, this freeze frame, retold a hundred stories I already know.

"A seven minute experience in proximity to this person can't tell you enough to be able to judge him," would be the logical obfuscation of the point here. Maybe that's true. What's also true, is that I'm a white, straight, cis male who's spent a whole of forty-eight years in environments where people who fit the same description are comfortable. By design, these environments aren't hard to come by. I grew up with the sons of those men. I knew their brothers, cousins, uncles. There were men like them in my family. A few of them were my school teachers and coaches. They've been my coworkers, bosses or people I was charged with supervising. Of course, not all of the men I've known are analogous to this one, but I'm quite familiar with a wide cross section of straight white men and their behavior. I don't believe this is representative of or especially particular to veterans either. My mother's father was a veteran, and among the kindest, most compassionate, gentle men I've ever had to fortune to know. This was part of who this man was, before the military. This is not a newly minted model of white guy, by any means, and in this model, what I was experiencing in the convenience store is a feature, not a bug.

That boy at his elbow, like most boys whose fathers are part of their lives, is going to worship that man. Children don't have much of a choice. It's both socially enforced and if not by evolutionary design, certainly the product of deductive reasoning which grows every minute in children. We all worship the parents who are in our lives as children. We need their attention to teach us what we are and how to be in the world, as well as provide the most basic necessities of survival. In this, this boy will do anything for the love of that man. If everything in the world around him tells him not to, it's not going to matter much. This is the one man, above all men, whose love and approval he will need. It's not conjecture to say this boy probably understands what that means already. It is the currency of their relationship, and these lessons would have been demonstrated to him millions of times by now. One of the lessons of the Satanic Panic was just how well and intuitively children are able to read what adults want, what will gain them approval from adults who are given some authority status. It became clear it only took children a few minutes in an interview, to be able to understand what it was the interviewer wanted to hear or already believed about the questions they were asking. By the time they're seven, a child has experienced over three million minutes, and for children, their conception of the world must be "us." Themselves and their parents as one, a unit of existence, in a world they're only beginning to have tasted. The flavor they perceive, is the influence of those millions of minutes spent with their parents.

I've seen how these relationships go. When this boy follows the model his father presents, it will bring him attention, maybe whatever passes for affection. The expression of affection features heavily in every piece of literature that's ever dealt with father and son relationships, and it is stereotypically fraught, nuanced, complicated, in the best circumstances. It's a coded language men teach each other in many ways, not just between fathers and sons, yet between fathers and sons... each individual circumstance produces it's own dialect. If the boy is lucky, where he doesn't follow the model this father presents, he'll get indifference, but few of these sons of men like this are that lucky. Scorn, belittlement, a constant state of waiting for the next sling or arrow. The "You don't know that for sure," crowd will take it poorly when I suggest someone loudly proclaiming haven taken pleasure in killing and a continued desire to murder people because of their religious affiliation, has a higher than typical likelihood of believing corporal punishment is acceptable in parenting. This sense of betrayal spewing out in a random convenience store among strangers would be even more comfortable at home. Is this conjecture? Partially, sure. As I said though, I haven't only known these men. Don't give me the, "This isn't your tribe," crap." I've known their sons, their grandsons, their nephews, their wives, their daughters, sisters, mothers and everyone in between. What many of them will never understand or be willing to face, is that people like myself and many others, aren't lured away from their insular clans by shadowy, conspiratorial forces converged on a desire to destroy them. We're repelled by their violence, and in the resulting isolation, we're are attracted to those who speak openly and honestly to their experiences with it. It is a requirement in so much of the world where they are so comfortable never to do that, and the sense of freedom and connection in finding people who do is only strengthened by further postures of domination. We didn't abandon them. They exiled us, and then the world that serves to coddle them required we not speak of it. We've found a tribe who doesn't require we ignore or lie about our experience with them.

This story, the story of this boy and his father, isn't guaranteed to end in tragedy. Some of the certainly do, but not all. What is certain, is nothing in that boys life is going to be made better or easier by having a man like this as his father. For some of the most important years of his life, his ability to see the world will be obscured by the shadow his father's perspective casts. Some of us do escape it. We do learn to shake it off. Not all of us. For many, there's a kind of opaque, unfocused in between. Sometimes other people in our lives recognize it when we're still children, and they do their best to provide a countervailing influence. How effective that is, depends on the individual circumstances. Each is like a twenty-four digit combination, that even the most well meaning and/or most learned person can bring about six digits to, at best, and hope they discover the rest along the way. They might try different combinations for all the years they have a chance, and still never crack it.

The reality is this relationship is going to be a source of heartbreak for this boy, the kind you just kind of have to live with for a long time, until you've accumulated enough experience with other kinds of heartbreak to be able to resolve it, if you ever even realize it's the thing ailing you. Maybe it'll be the heartbreak from the inevitable rift that would be deciding he won't be the son his father requires for that attention and acceptance to continue. It might not be as direct though either. This worldview of betrayal and bogeymen is likely to have other consequences in this boy's behavior, and the truth is, there is a good likelihood this boy draws his father's disappointment for being and doing exactly what he's been told he should be. It's a different heartbreak, but it is one all the same. Call it trauma if you want, but I'm a little tired of clinical language. It's good for what it's good for, but there's so much it misses, and in this case, the trauma is going to be inevitable heartbreak that comes from this boy's relationship to his father. Modeling a behavior like this in school isn't likely to win the boy friends or fans among the administration. People tend to not react so well to young boys proclaiming they want to kill people these days. Increasingly, they are unfortunately getting around to trying.

I can't help but think about that boy. I think about his future, what it's going to mean to have this man as his father. I think about the fact that this man is the fractionally more extreme place on a spectrum which has both bullied it's way into being the center of national attention, but has also been caressed and coddled by so many institutions, on their way. Then I think about parameters of the discussion of "the epidemic of loneliness in young men," and the way any reference to the reality this little boy, and many others, are going to live in, the reality that's going to raise them, is erased. It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart for that boy. It breaks my heart for the many, many people who are going to come into contact with him, before (and if) he has the chance to see the world differently, for someone to show him differently, to allow him to be loved better. It breaks my heart for the world that is going to inherit him, and for the degree to which he likely won't see that world as a place of wonder, awe or understand the lifelong adventure that is curiosity.

I know loneliness. I'm autistic, with a long history of PTSD symptoms misdiagnosed as treatment resistant major depression. I know loneliness intimately. I come from the same places young men and their loneliness epidemic originates. My childhood and adulthood were influenced by proximity to the men who were their fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers. Over and over, one of the most useful tools in combatting this loneliness was curiosity. It was this curiosity that lead me to finding the people who are being honest and open about their experiences with so many of these men, that even if they don't mirror mine as identical twins, it is inescapable that they are kin. It's been these people, who've been able to show me how human my experience is, how human my reaction and feelings about it have been. Some of those people have been, like me, men who have been glad to find our way to people who would allow us to and be loved better. Men like this one today, would say it's not manly, and maybe it's not, but the evidence is that it's overwhelmingly human. There is no more heartache about or for the man I should have been, the man men like these would want to require me to be. Maybe, we need to start asking a whole lot of men to allow themselves to love their boys better. If we're trying to understand where the loneliness epidemic in young men originates, we can't refuse to investigate the space between many young boys and their father's elbow.