Roll Tide: Enough! Me Too!

A left-wing cartoonist, rightly pointing out the lack of outrage over war and health care abuses, stupidly minimizes assault by men in power as “ass grabbing.”  Far-right Alabamians by the thousands justified voting for a pedophile by saying so many ridiculous things I can’t even repeat them here, so I’ll just refer you to any number of video interviews on the topic. Here’s the law though, 30+-year-old adults can’t “date” 14-year-old children. End of story. Move to one of those countries in the Middle East you on the right find so reprehensible if you really think that’s okay. I believe some of them still allow child brides, if only secretly.

Or go join the FLDS.

Don’t pretend you are Christian Americans.

Let me talk to those who spew that bullshit line about “it was 30 (10, 20, 40, 50, 100) years ago, it shouldn’t matter.”  As if molesting children has an expiration date. Or “Why are they just now coming forward?”

I can’t believe I am saying this again. I can’t believe this has to be said at all. God help you if you are ever assaulted sexually so you get to learn for yourself what this is like. God help you if you ever wake up and realize your heroes are shit. Some of mine were, as well.

Upon hearing of one of Roy Moore’s accusers, my spouse said to me, “Why didn’t she come forward sooner? She could have helped others. Instead, she wanted to get on with her life.” I was too angry to respond in full. At the time I tight-lip responded with something sharp and brief.

Here is my full anger and truth. Here is what he, and everyone else who asks that, needs to understand.

I was molested at the age of twelve. I never told anyone at the time. My parents both died in recent years never having known about it. I never told anyone in my family. I only told my second (current) husband. I never “came forward” to name the molester and never will. The perpetrator will never pay for his crime and in all likelihood he is dead. I will never tell anyone who he was. It’s done. It’s too late. I live with it. I never forget it. At times, the memory of it is so stark that it sends a sickening jolt through my bowels. As has been said, the body remembers.

But telling “authorities,” then and now, was never an option. Telling meant ruining someone else’s happiness (at least in my twelve-year-old brain) and it meant being judged for not doing something to stop it (I was not hogtied. I could have screamed and tried to run). It meant, as the expression in my family went, upsetting the apple cart. My family always seemed under fire due to my siblings going through various teen angst crap. I didn’t want to add another burden to my parents’ lives. I didn’t want to anger a person with whom I already had a poor relationship. I didn’t want to be accused of lying because of that poor relationship.

So, I didn’t tell.

And yes, I too wanted to get on with my life. I was twelve. I wanted to stuff this horrible event into a dark corner and pretend it never happened. I wanted to play in a schoolyard and be with my friends and listen to my music and be a child. I did not want the pain of dealing with it any more than I wanted to place that burden on my family.

And guess what? I didn’t have Mariska Hargitay (Law & Order: SVU) at my side saying, “You need to come forward. Think of all the other little girls he might be doing this to. Think of how many others he might hurt in the future.” In my twelve-year-old brain, for all I knew, I was the only victim. The other girls around him all seemed happy and were much older than I was. You know—15,16–Roy Moore would have liked them.

So, no, I didn’t come forward. And every time I watch some dumb procedural wherein some poor girl or woman is fighting the turmoil of reporting or not reporting, of being believed or not being believed, I wonder not that I didn’t come forward but that if I had, what a fat lot of good would it have done? No doubt he would have bullshitted his way out of it and the person I was not getting on with would have hated me all the more for ruining things further by taking that man out of the picture. Life would have been not one bit better and a pedophile would have gone on doing what pedophiles do.

Maybe not, but given the gutless response to the assault strategy of (and credible accusations against) our current White House resident and the astoundingly asinine response to Roy Moore’s “dating” habits (pedophilia), I don’t believe I’m wrong there.

So, ask me again why I did not come forward. Ask me again why that little girl and her mother did not come forward. Ask them what power they had with a leering lawyer standing over them when life is so much easier at 14 or 11 or even 30 or 50 if you just hide from the pain because your options for telling look as hellish as the time in his filthy presence.

But look out! The tide has finally come in. This isn’t a bandwagon, people. This is the ocean of women and men who, after decades of stuffing down our pain and rage, have found strength in numbers and are roaring in and saying ENOUGH! DAMN YOU! ENOUGH! You aren’t “ass grabbers” or funny guys “just talking locker room talk.” You are perpetrators and you MUST suffer the consequences. Lose an election. Lose your supporters in Congress or Hollywood. Lose your confident swagger as you walk the halls and sweat bullets and wait for the women you harmed to come forward.