Terrible Normalcy: Are you a bystander?

The girl has flaxen hair, straight, pale blonde, and pulled half-back. Her jeans lag down and disappear into wide-mouthed rain boots. Her arms are trembling with the effort, the strain of holding herself, pulling herself forward.

Who taught her to do that?

To straddle her chair, tilt her hips forward, and rock? To grip the desk for balance, to be unobtrusive and yet the most horrifically obvious sight in the room?

The first grade classroom, walls covered with bright posters, alphabet, spelling words, numbers, gallons/pints/cups, penguin art, and Bible verses. The desks are arranged in a horseshoe, one for each student, a nametag pressed neatly at the front, personal belongings and folders inside.

She is at the curve of the horseshoe and, like the elephant in the room, she’s all I can focus on.

Her peers sit down on their wee chairs, scoot forward, tucking into the desk, and set legs and feet together in a respectable, expected parallel. They might wiggle a bit, some even stand up at their place, but their movements are, again, expected. Six year olds wiggle. They sometimes quiver with energy.

The class comes to the rug for a movement break, stretching under the direction of “Captain.”

“Captain says….stand on one leg.”

The girl doesn’t stretch enthusiastically. She does address one of the few boys in the girl-heavy class at least twice, calling at him as though he is bothering her when he is not near enough to touch, just another first grader getting on with his stretching, shaking out his wiggles.

Normal.

What is normal?

A hard word to define.

Many would say masturbation is normal. A fulfillment of sexual need, a harmless, self-sufficient satisfaction of the libido, one of the Id instincts most “normal” humans possess.

Libido. Sex drive. Sex. Nouns, again, many would classify as normal. The average person desires sexual interaction. Normal people like sex.

But how old is that average, normal person?

Is it the twenty-something? Frisky, liberated, and youthfully attractive? Is it the thirty-something? A little older, handsome, and now more serious? The forty-something? Passionate, still-in-love with her partner? The fifty-something, experienced and comfortable? The sixty-something? What of the seventy-something?

Here many of us become squeamish.

Should “old” people still have that drive? Do our grandparents?

So let’s back up. Head the other direction.

Surely sexual desire is never more normal, more natural, than for teenagers. For these young people fresh out of puberty and on the cusp of looming responsibility. Their drive, according the popular media, is probably the strongest. We readily accept high school sweethearts and backseat affairs as normal.

But what about younger youth? What about those starting puberty? The girls in training bras, the boys with squeaky voices? Perhaps still normal, we’ll concede. Certainly these young ones are curious about sex.

And younger still?

Now you’re turning away. Your toes curl and your stomach twists. You don’t want to know.

Quickly we answer “No!” No. The tender years before puberty are not for sex. These babes have no drive, no lust. They can’t.

It’s not normal.

Oh, my friends, you who follow Game of Thrones, 50 Shades of Gray, all those high school and period dramas—this is reality.

Perhaps it’s a twisted reality. Unfortunately it is ours.

In this reality children under the age of ten, ones who ought to play with Legos and Barbies, who ask for bedtime stories, who run about outside commanding games of make-believe, these babies know about sex.

Some of them are active.

Someone showed them.

What a terrible reality.

I recently read an essay “Torch Song” by Charles Bowden. The author once wrote reports of rape. He interviewed victims or their families and published horrific cases of the brutalization of women (and occasionally men.) And of children.

“No one can handle the children,” he says. No one. “Sex crimes generally cycle people out in two years. And it is the kids who do it. No one can handle the kids” (Bowden 69).

I can’t.

Yesterday I watched a six year old girl with long flaxen hair, strands errant from winter static, legs mere twigs engulfed in wide-mouthed boots made for clomping through puddles and wading through snow banks, I watched this little girl rock herself roughly on her tiny first-grade plastic chair, masturbating.

She would stop, squeeze the squishy cupcake toy kept on her desk for relief, sit up and attend, lay her head on her arms across the desk labeled with her name that means “beauty;” but, inevitably, she’d begin again. Stiffening up, clenching her legs in a firm straddle, gripping the desk with white knuckles, she’d rock. Hard.

There was no pleasure visible in her little pale face. She didn’t look like she enjoyed what she did.

She looked like she performed a weary, painful duty, one she must continue or face punishment.

Someone taught her that.

Right?

I hope we can agree that is not normal.

Charles Bowden’s essay is not uplifting. He offers no hope. No solutions. “Nothing really helps,” he says. There is no escape from what’s he seen and heard. Nowhere to go where he can forget the horrific reality. And there are few to even talk to, to share the burden of the cases he’s researched. “Nobody wants to hear these things” (75).

I feel for Bowden. I wonder if he is still living in darkness.

I feel more for the little girl rocking on her tiny plastic chair. I know she is dealing with darkness. I am sure she did not choose to wander there. Not with her flaxen hair, her bubbling giggle, and her wide-mouthed, puddle-clomping rain boots.

I see her at the bottom of a pit. A pit filled with slime, refuse, and clutching hands. A pit of darkness. Deep, dank, and terrifying. A pit I don’t want to approach. A pit I’m not sure any normal hands can reach, any normal courage can plumb.

What can we do?

No one wants to hear about these things. No one wants to talk about them.

We just want to return to our well-lit houses and carpeted living rooms where we can turn off the screen when the news gets ugly, when the reality we’re in is too unpleasant. Too real. Too close.

I certainly want to hide.

 I don’t want to face the darkness. I don’t want to dive into that slimy, creeping pit. I don’t want to see elementary children masturbating or hear what happens on the weekends behind closed doors.

But more than I fear the darkness of that hole, more than I fear the horrific reality of perversion and the truth from the mouths of babes, do I fear inaction.

What could be more horrifying than being a bystander?

Many of us have heard these two famous quotes, one by Irish political and philosopher Edmund Burke, and one by Holocaust author and anti-activist Yehuda Bauer, that condemn inaction above all:

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ~Burke

“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” ~Bauer

You might say that one abused little girl cannot compare to the Holocaust. We are great at comparing the needs of the many to the needs of the few, or the individual. (Unless, of course, that individual is myself.)

But the many are made of individuals. How many of those Holocaust victims were abused little girls? How many lives could have been saved if one less person were a bystander?

People frequently wonder why I choose to live in Haiti, a country our U.S. President so eloquently describes as a “shithole.”

Isn’t it dirty? Isn’t it scary? Isn’t it messy? Depressing? Ugly? Impossible?

Sometimes, yes.

There is darkness in Haiti that I can never penetrate. (Not on my own.)

Just as there is darkness in our well-lit, fully-funded, carpeted, brightly decorated elementary classrooms here in the good ole’ U.S. of A.

The world is dark.

If we choose to properly look at the world around us, the one with manicured lawns and nails, with pressed, tucked-in shirts, with decent, hardworking, self-built people, with order and police and regulations—if we look with determination to the see the truth, we will see some twisted, ugly realities.

It’s hard to look.

You may not want to.

As I said, I don’t. I’d rather not see all the wretchedness.

But once seen, we can’t forget. I can’t forget that little girl with flaxen hair and white knuckles. I can’t forget the soiled way I felt when I saw her rocking, the dirtiness that spread from this abnormality, infecting outward. I can’t unsee the evil.

And I know I don’t want that evil to triumph.

Do you?

“Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You’ll need them throughout your life. God’s Word is an indispensable weapon. In the same way, prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare. Pray hard and long. Pray for your brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out.” ~Ephesians 6:13-18 MSG

“Strength! Courage! Don’t be timid; don’t get discouraged. God, your God, is with you every step you take.” ~Joshua 1:9 MSG

Jesus said, “In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties. But take heart! I’ve conquered the world.” ~John 16:33 MSG

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” ~Edmund Bauer