PULL DOWN THE VEIL OVER YOUR FACE WITH TWO HANDS

FAMILY SECRETS

If you go up into the attic of the house of the U.S.A., and poke around a little, you will find an old, musty chest. It’s maybe a chest from the 1880s I would imagine. Slowly you open the creaking top of the chest, and inside you find a box labeled in faded black charcoal Family Secrets.

Every family has its secrets—some just have more than others. But this find is special, I mean it’s unique; it’s historic, isn’t it? Yes, it is. The U.S.A. Family Secrets is mixed in with a bucket of mortar to patch the brick of the house. It’s mixed with denial, doublespeak, and hypocrisy. Granted this kind of covert hype makes it easier to control children, because the chest of family secrets is like Santa’s bag of goodies at Christmas time. As long as we don’t let the family secrets out, our kids are happy, and ignorance is bliss, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ and they think they’re going to live in the Garden Land of America.

We are the nation that purports to be a “Christian nation,” aren’t we? How is it then that we have trained ourselves so well to turn away, to turn our eyes towards the ground, to avert looking into the eyes of Mother Truth? This makes us a nation of dishonesty. Dishonest about the cruel oppressions of the past, their causal effects on the present, and their prophetic link to the future. Hypocrisy is being one way on the inside, but changing the outside to project our rightness in our own eyes. It’s wearing a mask like an actor who takes on the “face” of the person she’s portraying. We want the audience to see us with the mask---to see through the real face to only register the one portrayed.

We have “falsies” and “truthies.” They are all around us. It’s hard to get close to people when they have eyes in the back of their heads, but they have ways of watching. The “Truth Police” can only exist where there is no trust or a little trust. Since our forefathers (for me white, Scottish American) began this sewer of hypocrisy and doublespeak, to get what they wanted for themselves (shall we get real?) isn’t it for us to attempt to bring some answers and confessions to the public domain. Using doublespeak means we say one thing but mean another for our own purposes. It’s a clever distortion under cover in a land where statistics can lie depending on who is running the numbers.

To rationalize and continue our denial about what we actually did to human beings who don’t look like us or have the same color of skin hue, we must pretend that truth is stranger than fiction. We’ve created “sincere fictions” (Joe Feagin) to hold up the whole lie for somehow we have to, I mean just have to keep it held up. We like our fiction on CDs, movie theaters, DVDs, and draft houses, where we can suck our beer and punch more pizza into our mouths. We have to have it pretty to justify ourselves in our own eyes. We are the innocents! Our previous, familial generations could never have rapaciously ripped off the naïve and weak Indians in the way some people argue? The slaves from Africa were brought her to civilize them and bring them into another form of consciousness, out of savage wilderness, lonesome lands were only wild dogs and two-winged ones can exist. Their masters took care of them. Sure, you had the occasional rape or children out of wedlock coming from the consensual unions of whites and blacks. Indeed, they were happy and provided for by their owners and the plantations, were they not?

These are the fantasies that are fatal. When children wake up to the fact that the ones who love them the most (the “gods”) have lied to them for years about the truth of a being named Santa Claus, this is a rude and traumatic shock to a child’s entire conscience, brain chemistry, cognitive processes, and affective education for their sentiments and emotions.

Family secrets are closed off from public view, and peculiar masks and hypocritical means must be found to keep them hidden; the light hurts their eyes as they lie in the attic with chains of invisible silk.

© Christopher Bear Beam 11/09