Milkwhite Malevolence

There is a literary tradition - and, of course, an actual history - of a kind of purity perverted. A purity of festered piety, a purity of bigoted and/or self-righteous entitlement, a purity of lily-white and trembling vessels, not of the milk of human kindness, but of the venom of terrified xenophobia. I talked with someone like this recently; it was, itself, a kind of terrifying moment.

The literary characters often seem to have wide, clear eyes, clear, pallid skin, and a hermetic life experience which renders them inflexible either to the point of brittleness, or disastrous cruelty. The reality might be many things, but it seems, unscientifically, as if these days, it manifests oftenest in self-righteousness.

How the conversation turned to teenage mothers, I don't know, but I stumbled upon this purity of hatred when I said that no thirteen-year-old girl can be held responsible for this. The wide, pale eyes alit, and I was told, "You would be surprised" and flatly contradicted. Apparently, this person had been acquainted at some point with a real slut of a thirteen year old girl; and she was not to be told that that does not occur naturally.

No, there are thirteen year old girls, it seems, who must be held to task for THEIR behavior.

The point that, perhaps, the girl this person had known might not have had the advantages her passionate (and creepy) judge had had was not one to make with much hope. The resentment and rigidity could not be released.

I don't know if this person was cheated on with a thirteen year old girl, or if their experience was so fundamentalist growing up that the legal and moral attitudes of generations long gone by survived intact somehow. There was no clarity on how this purity of anger had become what I saw before me. Opaque ... as milk.


I was a coward, and didn't push for a conversion. It seemed to me useless to mention that legally no child is held so bitterly responsible as this person had presumed to impose culpability. Sometimes, running into a wall, I suppose I shatter - a brittleness of my own, thrown against the implacability of ignorant superiority. I don't even know what to do with it, thinking of it.

Only this - as a writer, I will fight against anger of this kind. With those I can hope to speak with, I will. In myself, I'll set what example I can ...


Milk or venom ... I can hope for nourishment, not poison. I can spill one, and serve the other.

People are so fascinating.

It's a pity that's so often so sad.