Not All of Us Are Saints by David Hilfiker

Author:David Hilfiker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466802919

What is it like to grow up the child of such abuse? What is it like for Derwin to be told repeatedly by his parent that he is “bad”? What is it like for Jenny, as a three-year-old, to be forced to have intercourse with an adult? What is it like for Shawn to be struck repeatedly for what ought to be considered normal behavior? What is it like to suspect almost from the day of your birth that you arenot really loved? When a person believes she is not loved, she comes quickly to believe that she is not lovable, and from this inescapable pain grows rage.

I think of my own history. Through years of psychotherapy I have come to understand how harmful my own mother’s hidden depression and the stifling of conflict in my childhood home were to my emotional health. I think of my own children: I am quite aware that my emotional aloofness, my judgmental tendency, my difficulty in expressing anger have psychologically injured them. (Will they also need psychotherapy?) My suffering, my children’s suffering are real, but the emotional scars of my youth, the emotional damage I inflict upon my children pale into insignificance when I consider Jenny, or Derwin, or Shawn. If I have been made less functional by my suffering, what is the effect of theirs?

What is it like to grow up where fathers are absent from most homes and too many of the male “role models” on the streets are alcoholics, drug addicts, or pushers; where so many of the female “role models” are pregnant by the time they are fifteen? What is it like to grow up in a neighborhood where those who struggle against all odds and manage to stay off welfare and get honest employment are consigned to a lifetime of working two jobs at minimal wages just to eke out, at best, a subsistence living; where the flashy lifestyle of the drug trade is the primary example of success; where there is otherwise little hope for a future any different from the intolerable present; where the expectation of a persistent, degrading poverty pervades?

What is it like to grow up as a poor black child watching television programs and surrounded by advertisements whose basic message is that personal worth is measured by elegant homes, powerful cars, a suburban family, or sex appeal? These children, too, succumb at an early age to the myth that ours is an egalitarian system in which all start out equal and one’s true merit is measured by material success. Their very poverty becomes one more irrefutable bit of evidence of their worthlessness. The dominant culture’s message is starkly clear: If you were worth anything, you, too, would live in the suburbs andhave all the “things” promised in the ads. These children live in conditions inhospitable to the human spirit. Is it any surprise that their usual response is to give up, blame themselves, lash out?

My thoughts turn again to my own family and to

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