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By Root 1185 0

did not happen daily, weekly, or even monthly. And even had the beatings occurred—which I need to reassure both you and me that they did not—they could never have been made into such a spectacle. Who could endure such a thing? And who could perpetrate it? I have no recollection of sitting frozen on the couch, eyes directly forward, feeling more than seeing my siblings near to me, none of us touching, none of us moving, none of us making a sound, each of us simultaneously absent and preternaturally present, hyperaware of every one of my father's movements. I do not remember my father's leg frozen in mid-kick, nor can I see his face closed off with fury. I recollect nothing of this. Because it didn't happen. My brother doesn't have epilepsy, and if he does it could not have been caused by blows to the head. My sister never wakes up screaming that someone is in her room, in her bed. She never fears that someone will step out from behind a door to hit her, or to push her onto a bed. The smell of alcohol on a lover’s breath does not terrify me, because my father did not drink. And even if he had, he would never have become drunk. And even if he would have become drunk, he would never have entered my room.

And the worst of it all is that even if he would have, I would never have remembered a thing.

Do not believe a word that I write in this book, about my father, about the culture, about anything. It's much better that way.

A study of Holocaust survivors by the psychologists Allport, Bruner, and Jandorf revealed a pattern of active resistance to unpleasant ideas and an acute unwillingness to face the seriousness of the situation. As late as 1936, many Jews who had been fortunate enough to leave Germany continued to return on business trips. Others simply stayed at home, escaping on weekends into the countryside so they would not have to think about their experiences. One survivor recollected that his orchestra did not miss a beat in the Mozart piece they were playing as they pre tended not to notice the smoke from the synagogue being burned next door.

And what do we make of the good German citizens who stood by? By what means did they suppress their own experiences and their own consciences in order to participate or (similarly) not resist? How did they distract themselves from the grenade that slowly rolled across the floor?

Think for a moment about the figure I gave earlier: twenty- five percent of all women in this culture are raped during their lifetimes. One out of four. Next, think for a moment about the number of children beaten, or of the one hundred and fifty million children— one hundred and fifty million —enslaved, carry ing bricks, chained to looms, chained to beds. If you were not one of the women raped, if you were not one of the children beaten, if you were not one of the children enslaved, these numbers probably don't mean very much to you. This is under standable. Consider your own life, and the ways you deny your own experience, the way you have to deaden your own empa thies to get through the day.

We live our lives, grateful that things aren't worse than they are. But there has to be a threshold beyond which we can no longer ignore the destructiveness of our way of living. What is that threshold? One in two women raped? Every woman raped? 500 million children enslaved? 750 million? A billion? All of them? The disappearance of flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time? The death of salmon runs so thick that it was impossible to dip an oar without "striking a silvery back"? The collapse of earthworm populations?

This deal by which we adapt ourselves to the receiving, wit nessing, and committing of violence by refusing to perceive its effects on ourselves and on others is ubiquitous. And it is a bad deal. As R.D. Laing has written about our culture, "The condi tion of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of be ing out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to