The Electric Chair

Ted Reads The Electric Chair

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The Electric Chair

One of my biggest fears growing up was that I would get blamed for something I didn’t do. I had nightmares about it. The fear was that I would be blamed for something, go to jail and be executed for something I didn’t do. It was real. I was terrified. I know it sounds dramatic, but it was real.

Part of that I am sure was a result of my unique weirdness as a human being. Other parts came from my actual experience. I grew up in an environment where I was the youngest person, by four years in a large clan of folks. I was constantly being blamed for things they did. I was punished for things I didn’t do. Corporally punished.

And threatened. My father told the story that as a high school senior he had taken a field trip to the Ohio State prison. He spoke of how he, and each of his classmates visited the room where prisoners were executed and each of them actually sat in THE electric chair. The story was told with a dark ominous mood that fed my “I’m innocent, but no one will believe me” fear. The message I received was that execution is ultimately what happens to “bad” people who do bad “things” so don’t be one of them.

In real life it didn’t matter what I said, I was guilty until proven innocent. And that never happened. All of this was deeply imprinted on my soul. I got the impression they thought I was basically some kind of delinquent and if push came to shove if the authorities ever came for me, they would say, “We know” and off I would go. Ultimately, to the electric chair. The very same one my father had sat in. (I was a little kid, remember.)  In the little town close to us there was the sheriff’s house with part of it serving as the local jail. Bars on the window and comments like, “That’s where you’re headed unless you straighten up” were frequent.

I’m sure it was only an attempt to scare the be-jeezous out of me with the intent to make me “be good” and it worked. I’m sure I WAS guilty of a lot of things and that added to the narrative. I am sure I lied sometimes about what I DID do, which didn’t add to my “guiltless” claim. Such occasions only added to my “jacket” (as they say in the criminal world). Telling the truth brought on another kind of punishment.

That fear is seared into my psyche. I still have those very same dreams. Only now in them, I am an adult, and I am in a situation where no one believes me and there are deadly consequences. This makes me especially sensitive to any situation where I am not believed.

In those real-life insistences I try to defend myself. Try to set things straight. Plead with the accusers to listen and believe me and let go of the story they have made up. I’ve found that they rarely let go of the story they’ve constructed. Even more rarely do they recognize or admit they have even made up a story. They believe what they have made up is the irrefutable truth.

When I try to explain myself, when I try to share where I was coming from, they dismiss what I say and accuse me of being defensive. Essentially accusing me of lying. They suggest they know my motives and intentions better than I do. Insisting I’m just rationalizing and in denial. All attempts to correct their version of events only seem to make things worse.

If the relationship isn’t all that important to me, I withdraw. I distance myself knowing it will happen again. Understanding that this is how they move through the world, not just with me, but with others. If the relationship is important to me, I still withdraw but more quietly. I shut up. I don’t agree, but I do remove some of my essential energy from the relationship. A small but vital part of me, the most vulnerable parts, become unavailable. I am not safe with them. It’s subtle enough that they can’t tell the difference, but I can.

I call these the little deaths in a relationship. The ones that, over time, kill intimacy. Not all at once but a death of a thousand small cuts. The relationship becomes a cautious arrangement, one where I find myself being more and more careful with my words to reduce the chances of being misunderstood.

I lived my nightmare again recently. Someone I consider one of my safest, longest-standing friends read something I texted them and experienced it as an insult. Actually, my message had come from that tender, reflective, private place in me.

As I tend to do with people I care about, I tried to explain my intent. To no avail. My efforts only seemed to intensify their anger and contempt. Feeding the fire. Eventually, I stopped trying to be understood. “I’m sorry my words hurt you.”  My apology only made things worse.

Then I shut up. I let go of the fantasy that they would believe me. I could feel a part of me die. I had abandoned myself; I gave up on being my own protector.

As I always do in moments like this, I asked myself: What could I have done differently to prevent this? The way the NTSB analyzes a plane crash, carefully, without blame, looking for my contributing factors. There were a couple.

Don’t send tender, nuanced, vulnerable messages by text. If something matters that much, say it in person. Or at least in a voice message. Better yet, on video, where tone, softness, the smile on my face, and the twinkle in my eye can accompany the words and hopefully reduce the chances of the receiver making up a story that was never mine. A story that is 180 degrees from my truth. Another reminder was to practice assuming the best when I receive a message from someone, so that MY assumptions don’t become another person’s wound.

What’s been your experience of being misunderstood. What do you do?

POLITICAL COMMENTARY TO FOLLOW  

I’ll bet there are little kids that at this moment in time in our country are going to bed tonight worried about the same thing I was as a little kid, and it isn’t a dream, it’s a real-life nightmare. We are now putting little kids (as young as five) into detention centers.

The Germans used trains, we use planes. Some go to detentions centers.  Some are sent to other cooperating countries.  We have no idea what happens to them there.  Most of the concentration camps in the 1940’s were not in Germany, they were located in other countries, for deniability purposes.  History does tend to repeat itself.  

Someone recently said to me, “I don’t recognize the country I’m living in.”  I told them they weren’t crazy. This is not the America many of us were raised in and asked to believe in.

The America we were raised in positioned herself as a moral leader in the world. When atrocities occurred, we named them. We took stands against them. They often were used to justify our going to war, whether those atrocities were actually true or not. The Nuremberg Trials are but one such example.

Now, we are the perpetrators.

The unabridged, unredacted truth is that America has always had a dark underbelly of doing the very things that we publicly condemned. More than you could ever imagine. Regardless of political party.

At least back then we publicly condemned them. It was still not right, and they represented moral failures, but we did not publicly applaud them, nor were we asked to. Except for a few outliers, we didn’t brag about it.

When some of those deeds were exposed, there were consequences. Outrage from patriotic citizens. Perps went to jail. Presidents resigned in shame. Laws were enacted to reduce the chances of “it” happening again. Reparations were paid. Firings. Prosecutions.

This is a new America. We no longer hide it. The “new” America openly engages in behaviors we once claimed to oppose. For many of us, the loss of even pretending to be a moral compass is devastating.

Compounding that loss is the shock of discovering how many people, friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues are not only okay with this shift but openly celebrate it. Justifying it. Defending it. Denying it. Making excuses for it. Others remain silent, which functions as endorsement and collusion.

It’s like discovering you were adopted. Like learning you have siblings you never knew existed. The difference being that those kinds of discoveries do not repeat themselves day after day. Typically, those kinds of revelations are a ‘one-off.’  What’s happening these days is a daily slow drip poison that is slowing killing the America I grew up in.

So you are not crazy if you don’t recognize this America. You are not crazy if you grieve the losses. You are not crazy if you feel betrayed. You have been.

Let’s also not forget that for millions of Americans this is not new.  They have lived with what we are seeing happen to lighter skinned citizens every day of their lives.  This isn’t rhetoric, I have been present while such things have happened to them.  What we are seeing is and has been their normal.