Vouched Books

I go through fits with the world. Sometimes, I pull far back from it, I tend to my own garden, I let the world move around me how it moves. I have to, else I let the world swallow me up. Then, there are times I feel extremely connected to the world and what is happening in it. The past couple weeks I’ve felt much the latter.

First, Roxane Gay’s essay at The Rumpus. Then the terror of reading the Sandusky Grand Jury report. And then, waking this morning to scenes on the news of the riot police sweeping through Zuccoti Park.

I’ll admit: I’ve yet to decide how I feel about the Occupy movement. I like its heart, but I’m not sure where I stand on its body. I recognize the disparity of income, the injustices of corporate greed, but there’s some scapegoating and some tactics I can’t exactly get behind. Sometimes, I just like that there are people moving, there are people speaking.

I’ll go on record to say I hate the 53% movement, this movement that likes to outline how hard their lives are, and tell others to stop whining about how hard theirs are. I don’t get behind any movement that tries to tell others they don’t have a right to petition their government about grievances.

I’m getting off track.

What I wanted to talk about here was that last week, I vouched an official document, the Grand Jury report in the Gerald Sandusky case, stating it as now a part of our literature, however horrific the allegations. I despaired over that document, the depravity it outlined.

I wanted to say that today I came across a different sort of document. Another official document that this time gave me a hope.

Last night, the police swept Zuccoti Park. Protesters who refused to leave before the sweep were arrested. The People’s Library was thrown in the trash (I cannot abide by the trashing of books and art). As of this morning, there were reports that officers around the park were refusing to let some protesters back into the area.

There is also this. A group of lawyers (the occupation people love to hate) filed suit against the city, claiming a breach of the movement’s First Amendment Rights. The judge ruled in favor of the Occupiers, even going so far as to order that the City of New York is not allowed to evict the protesters from the park, nor enforce the no camping rules “published after the occupation began or otherwise.”

I don’t know where I stand on the Occupy movement, but I stand without hesitance against anyone trying to restrict the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression. Reading this court ruling against the city of New York gave me hope today. I hope it might give you some of the same.

I’ve tried my hardest to not care about the current events developing around the Penn State Campus the past week. Until today, it was pretty easy. Ignorant of the whole picture, it was easy to simply classify it as “another college sports scandal,” a.k.a. “things near the very bottom of my to-care-about list.”

But today, the Grand Jury report of the unfolding case against Gerald Sandusky was released, and at the sharing by a good handful of friends, I clicked the link, and began to read.

I began to read, and despite the growing sting of bile building in my stomach, I could not stop. It wasn’t out of some sick fascination, like slowing while passing an overturned vehicle or watching the report of a train derailed. It was that I could not understand suddenly who we were, and I needed desperately to understand.

I could not understand how these things could happen, and people could know about these things happening, and these people did not consider beyond themselves what is good and right and true and what should have been done, which was everything you can do to save those children.

I’ve been struggling the past few hours now whether to vouch this report. I’ve been struggling that people might see it as baiting Web traffic. I’ve been struggling that it doesn’t “align with the mission of Vouched Books.”

For the past few hours, I’ve been swallowing at the lump of confusion and cold dread that swelled up at my center, feeling completely powerless.

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In her recent essay at The Rumpus, Roxane Gay wrote:

“Language is at once exhilarating and impossible. We have innumerable words and phrases but all too often, they don’t fully represent what they should. They allude or approximate meaning but rarely do they begin to encompass the depth of experience.”

She wrote about the cold, anemic language of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding Troy Davis, the 23 words that said at their core, “We are going to allow you to die.”

The Sandusky Grand Jury report, as you would expect a report to be, was similarly cold, similarly official and sterile of any emotion or pathos or earnest morality beyond the rule of law.

But, I’m not sure I have ever been more affected by a piece of writing. I’m not sure I’ve ever read something that highlights so well what we are capable of. It recounts in stark and horrific detail the stories of 8 known victims of Gerald Sandusky. It recounts who was made aware of the occurrences, and what little was done about them over the past decade.

I’m vouching the Grand Jury report, because I believe it is an important and necessary thing to read. It is not literature in the classic sense. It is not beautiful, nor is it “a good read.” But, it is necessary.

Literature at its best shows us ourselves as real and as true as possible in our glory and our horror. This report does exactly that. Whether we like it or not, this report is a part of our literature now, the events in it a part of our history, a part of what we are as a whole humanity. We are capable of this.

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We are capable, too, of so much more.

I once wrote that I started Vouched Books because literature saved me as a child. I wanted to push a literature that I felt could save others. I believe this is that sort of literature, by showing us what we do not want to be, similar to how my step-father showed me.

So, I’m vouching this report, because it’s what I can do. It may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I can do.

Reading this report, it’s easy to feel powerless. It is always easiest to feel powerless.

But we are not that. We are remarkably capable. We are capable of the kinds of viles and horrors outlined in that report, true. But we are also capable of equally kind and compassionate and beautiful things.

We can be so much more than who we are today.