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Phil Dillon's avatar

I can attest the truths this essays reveal.

My brother, sister, and I grew up in Boston. Our mother was an uneducated (only went was far as third grade) from Newfoundland and our father was Boston Irish. I was their youngest child, born in 1942.

Our father was an alcoholic. That was terrible, but even worse was the fact that he found out he had Tuberculosis when he took a physical to join the Marines right after Pearl Harbor. He refused to get treatment and retreated into a life of constant booze. He died in 1948, leaving our mother in desperate straits. She couldn’t cope and was hospitalized in an institution for 2 or 3 years. My brother, sister, and I became “wards of the state” and wound up in a place called Pendergast Preventorium, a home for children who had been “in contact with TB.” We lived in that setting far too long. I hated it. They separated us by age, which meant I rarely got to see my brother and sister. I used to beg the caregivers to bring me to them and they never did.

We were finally reunited as a family after about three years. It was a rough life but we were together. Our mother was constantly neurotic after years of institutional life, shock treatments, etc but she loved us and did whatever she could for us.

Other than the income we could scrounge up doing odd jobs we were dependent on state aid, which we all hated. It hit me especially hard when, on one occasion, the welfare check was late and my mother sent me to city hall with a note pleading for the check. As I stood at the window I overheard a conversation about me.

“Who’s the kid?”

“Him? He’s Susie Dillon’s boy. She’s an uneducated immigrant snd his father drank himself to death.”

“Sad….Poor kid…We’re gonna’ be taking care of him for the rest if his life.”

I’ve never felt so wounded, before or since.

That attitude was mirrored not only in the workings of the welfare state, but also in many levels of the society I grew up in. Some of us were the lower caste, objects of pity and our “betters” were being noble in taking care of us, albeit from a distance. We learned in time that we could never mingle with our betters.

In time my brother, sister, and I escaped the clutches of the system.

We haven’t set the world on fire, and that’s alright. We never made it to the “noble” American class of benefactors, but we’ve simple, honest lives and that’s been more than enough.

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Hiroyuki's avatar

That research about the incest hits pretty close to home.

When I was in undergrad at an elite West Coast school, I was debating people in the dorm about various points of morality (being one of the only Christians there, and most certainly one of the only conservative Christians). I remember the topic of incest was brought up--I point blank asked them if they thought incest was unethical. They said they were really uncomfortable with the idea, but that honestly, they had no way to say that it was immoral in any way. Just had no vocabulary to argue against it.

A few years later, I was having dinner with my parents at a ritzy neighborhood in Bethesda, MD. We overheard a little girl asking her dad why it was wrong to be a cannibal. His exact response: "Hmm I don't know sweetie, I don't think we as a species can really answer that question..."

Over and over again I am astounded at how the upper echelon has absolutely no moral compass. Not even so much that they are amoral, it's that they have a primitive understanding of moral issues

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