I watched a documentary last week that included some clips from Geraldo Rivera’s career-making 1972 short, “The Last Great Mistake,” about the way mentally handicapped kids lived in an institution on Staten Island called Willowbrook. I did not expect these clips. I was not prepared for them. They were amongst the most devastating and heartbreaking things I have ever seen. Something broke inside of me when I saw them and it hasn’t knit itself back together again. This happens to me sometimes. Sometimes I become so overwhelmed by the violence of our world, as that violence ends up being encapsulated in this or that event — Indigenous children frozen in the snow trying to find their way home, Nazis using dogs to chase down little kids outside the camps, a baby scalded with coffee and left to die three days later in his crib, and now these kids naked and wailing and flailing and covered in feces in darkened rooms where the curtains were never opened, some clustered around a couch, some curled up in fetal positions on the bathroom floor, some isolated in dark corners, naked and sitting bent over hugging themselves because they are sad and they are scared and they are alone and there is no one else to hug them – that I feel like something snaps and disappears. Something inside breaks and goes away for awhile. And I also want to disappear, go away, stop. Which is not to say that I want to die but that I don’t want to know anything anymore, I don’t want to say anything anymore, I don’t want to do anything anymore. I want to lay down and stop talking and not get up for a very, very long time.
I want to cry and not be comforted until these things never happened.
