October 12th, Supreme Court, One First Street, NE, Washington, D.C. From 4:00 - 6:00 pm

Photographs by Larry Cohen

She’d come in and out of my peripheral vision, skinny-legged, dark and absolute.  Her bony finger pointed at me while her other hand held a miniature American flag on a cheap wooden stick.   It twirled round and round, and got caught; made a never-ending spiral.  Leaning in, she threw a little landmine.

“Pray for your father.” she said.

My chest burst with heat and hardness.  My nerves shot out like a porcupine, all pricks.  Even as her words raised my anger, and created a disgust underneath, I remained still.  Then I became frozen.  Through her frail body, a Christian proselytizing was coming right at me.  Like a boomerang, I knew that any feelings of hate going out would come right back.

Her decree on my life had shaken me.  All of this reminded me of my sisters embrace of Born-Again Christianity, and I felt a twinge of grief that we have been estranged from each other for the last 35 years. I suspect that the Evangelical right opposes the emotional body.  Long long ago, one of my sisters had spoken to me of praying to a “good” father which replaced the actual one we had had; at times she conveyed that a heavenly being might be there to protect and save her.  In my twenties, I’d sneered at the idea with a roll of my eyes. In large part, because I remembered as a six-year old praying to a “god” for the terror to stop.  Laying in bed, I’d whisper to that unknown entity.  Whispering, I’d become small enough to disappear, small enough to help me avoid any punches, or the possibility of being thrown across the room.   

With time and distance, I’ve come to understand my sisters need for an imaginary being of kindness.  Maybe it had given her something to hang onto, some bit of hope.  Yet my conflicted feelings around her “heavenly father” have betrayed my deep skepticism of most religious institutions.  I find the harsh judgement of “sinners” by Evangelicals enraging.  I find their moral hypocrisy to be incomprehensible for it has often been in the name of god that not a few have devoted themselves to criminal acts.  Instead, I trust we are held by a tangle of bones, blood and water, muscles and movement, memory and words. Essentially, most of us are a mess.  After a little while, the thin woman with the flag visited me again, and offered other words of enlightenment, “I’m an M.D,” and “God is good.”   She was bent on extracting forgiveness. 

When my siblings and I were toddlers, Aunt Dottie and her husband visited us occasionally, and I remember a particular gathering in the basement.  Down there, we had vinyl flooring…you know the kind that is rolled out and glued down, mahogany colored paneled walls, and overwrought Spanish style furniture that produced a heavy, almost sinister feel.  My parents’ intention had been to create an exotic, and warm environment, but it was Just. Plain. Wrong.  On the coffee table, a big red ashtray shaped like a disproportionate leaf was consistently full of cigarette butts and ash.  Aunt Dottie was in her 50’s, and she had crusty out-of-the-package red hair, teased up-up-up delicate-like.  It had an airiness about it, but it looked like it might crash.  With a menthol cigarette dangling from her mouth, she blew smoke in our faces as she told us about the end of the world.  Aunt Dottie and her husband were Jehovah’s Witness and they reveled in the story of Armageddon.  We sat in a circle on the floor, while she parked herself in a chair above us, crossing her legs under a beige A-line.  She leaned down to tell us of the dramatic sins of man, and at eight years old, I was on the edge. I looked up at her with intrigue, fear and repulsion. 

Kneeling at the bottom of the stairs of the Supreme court, and being helicoptered by the woman with the tiny flag, I thought about Aunt Dottie and the sheer we-know-the-profound-goodness-through-God attitude of religious people.  Ironically, our Supreme court has also decided on the laws of American goodness.  Some of the appointees had masked their own deviations with defiant self-righteousness, (Kavanaugh’s tearful fury) while having sexually violated women. And now they’ve overturned Roe vs. Wade.

It wasn’t a revelation that Kavanaugh and Thomas would vote this way, after all they had had a history of not giving a f*%#k about women’s bodies’.  And they could get away with it.  Kavanaugh was nominated by the 45^th President, a regular pussy-grabber himself and sometimes rapist.  Anita Hill had been grilled with hostility by a group of 14 white men on her allegations that Thomas sexually harassed her.  Despite her brave testimony in 1991, twenty years later, Kavanaugh was voted in by the same old boys.  The usual blueprint for gender violence is still with us.  The patriarchy continues…

The Fundamentalist is often constrained by black and white thinking which is not far from how police tend to approach situations.  The suspect is usually assumed to be guilty. While I was growing up, I inherited this black and white thinking too.  Being shaped by forces out of my control, I often had to make hard choices in order to survive and this is what intense fear can do. A defensive stance grew large in my belly and feet. As a young adult, I often perceived hostility where it didn’t exist in jobs, relationships and just about every other daily situation. I wasn’t able to trust my body and I made a lot of mistakes along the way.  

I understood as I knelt on the sidewalk that whatever form of preaching was coming from the Christian doctor, it may have been that she had her own sharp defenses up to protect her from a lack-of.  Where would we all be without our own fierce private natures. I aimed to stay close to my breath, close to the reality of the present.  This was the practice that kept me in check against a judging mind which had hardened my attitudes in the past. It still takes work.

In a little while, hordes of high-schoolers began showing up on buses.  The what-ifs arrived abruptly in my mind and I suddenly got scared.  These teenagers were on their way to adulthood.  How were they going to absorb this embroidered letter on my back.  Small crowds gathered behind me.  My concern increased as I witnessed more and more of them arriving.  I had made my commitment to be here, and I convinced myself that I didn’t have control of my environment, but I also felt anguished, and shamed that very young people were reading my letter.  Would any of these students relate to this story or would they simply be traumatized?  Ironically, I prayed that a concerned adult wouldn’t come over and berate me for bringing my story into this world for these kids to see.  Guilt made me feel wooden.

The charm and exuberance that emanated from the adolescents made me question what might be invisible, underneath, in their lives.  Many of them looked as if they came right out of the Brady Bunch or some other PG-TV show.  White, middle-class and wholesome.  With shiny hair, and broad smiles and no sign of self-consciousness, I was astonished by their brightness.  I continued to kneel, changing from one knee to the other.  Time marched on, unsurprisingly, not one kid approached me.

However, when I later looked at the photographs taken by my photographer, I noticed one young boy from the crowd; he stood alone looking at my cape.  I wondered why he’d been absorbed in my story for so long, and I hoped it wasn’t that he was also being abused by a relative or family “friend.” 

As I knelt, I remembered that during other art actions a few men had hinted at or even confided in me that they, too, had been beaten or sexually molested as children.  If women are silenced about their sexual trauma, I suspect boys and men are also hiding it, maybe even more so.  As I knelt on the ground, I could only guess at the teens’ thoughts.  For a passing moment I remembered my father.  He had mentioned flippantly to my mother that he had been abused inside an orphanage as a child and I have no doubt that it contributed to his malign adult behavior.  I wondered…if he had been able to tell his story to someone who listened with empathy, would it have changed his rage into something less dangerous?  What actually happened to him inside that institution?  Keeping the secret keeps the shame keeps the body hidden.  The story goes on.  Sometimes, I still curse god in my helplessness, though I know that a prayer for courage would be better.