What nobody talks about, but everyone should

I know, I know; ‘should’ is such a supposedly negative, demanding, shaming word. Apparently. No, what is shaming is entirely different.

It’s the victimisation of someone who’s been assaulted, the cannibalisation of a less powerful family member by the family as a whole, the sensationalism of an issue to cover over a real wrong. It’s scapegoatism at its core.

I like the poem, No One Does, by Lori Anne Thompson — no one does but someone should.

One line particularly resonated like the mix of an echo and a chill:

“How the victim is infused with shame
by offender and onlooker alike.”

When anyone’s been victimised, and let’s face it, most of us should care, because most of us have been punished by the shame of such a thing, we should recognise the paradoxical sting of injustice. It taints every joy and smells foul in the room.

The victim is infused like two-week-old tea within their inescapable shame, because the room is filled with their offender and onlookers (everyone else) alike. Isolation is the victim’s passage into a shame that is inevitably theirs; a shame that doesn’t fit and should never have been. And that segregation lingers on the palate of the soul.

The offender works the room with calculating precision. Theirs is a cunning beyond myriad many who what to ‘keep the peace’, never knowing and never understanding that that kind of ‘peace’ is a war waged against God. Division is the offender’s master game. His is the glitz and the glam. He loves it because he’s ballsy enough to kill for the win. He’s worked it before, and he’ll do it again.

And there she is, in the corner of the room, immobile, defenceless, shivering in the cold of the onlooker’s genteel disdain. Any of us who have watched on as an evil occurred and did nothing to stop it; that’s the genteel disdain I speak of. Oh, I’ve been gutless before. I know what it’s like to turn a blind eye.

But no more!

The Holy Spirit says, “it’s right there, let not your conscience rest!”

What nobody talks about, but everyone should.

The way she’s leered at; the licking of his lips; the offender’s shitty remark that engenders a nervous smile in the onlooker; the lazy feet-up attitude; the misogynistic laugh; sex sold on secretive scale; the manipulative guile of a man who behaves like a god. The fool. God will have him in God’s time.

It’s not the victim’s shame that’s the real shame; it’s the shame of the onlooker who did nothing, who pretended ‘nothing to see here!’, who wailed in their silence some cold story of superficiality to blend a little comfort into their guilt.

What nobody talks about, but everyone should: sexual assault, rape, incest, covert bullying, stalking, fakery, manipulation for gain, myriad form of harassment… the list goes on…

And on... And on... And on...

What we must do is the little we can
for the biggest difference that we alone can do.

It’s all we can do and it’s always enough.

Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash