Wow, I don’t know what to say about all this. This story was really an accurate and insightful blend of personal narrative and highly connected insights into our specific American current situation and the general dynamics of oppression by a dominant culture. This is one of the best I’ve read and deserves wider acclaim. It connects the “small” rural experience a child impact-fully feels yet can’t articulate, as children find themselves in such key episodes trapped in this larger adult emotional realm of constructed but restrained irrationality of anger, fabricated by bigger political forces—with what thoughtful adults later should see surrounding them when looking back on such an memorable episode in the environment they couldn’t imagine was there when looking back.
Once the dust settles in a few days and I’m done mulling this over, I’ll have to go back and read it again to make sure I grasped the ideas I clearly understood. That is the power of experiential reasoning gained from deep reflection on concrete events: we cannot believe what we are first told and read, so we have to go back to make sure we thought what we thought (how could this have happed? Did I really live through this?). It makes me want to go back to my childhood to see what I saw and experienced but missed.
Excellent five star piece of writing that inspires.