I know pandemic denial isn't the same as the old evangelical rejection, but they feel the same. They both feel like the Inquisition, too.
I fail the interrogations.
They're both life-and-death threats, though technically one threatens my current, rather than afterlife, status. In both cases my deficiencies as immunocompromised or unevangelical are deemed incorrect and therefore punishable. And in both, the adherents will deny that this is the case.
Do we wonder why political prisoners are often stashed away in psychiatric institutions rather than prisons? I don't.
This morning I realized that it was July 16, the anniversary of my family's exit from Portugal to Boston in 1964. No one else remembers the date, but it has always loomed for me as the beginning of the evangelical interrogation. I did not understand in Leiria that my schoolfriends were Catholic and thus outside of the missionary community. In any case my identity as 'Other' and 'nonevangelical' was already a family truth.
When did it happen? Was I seven, four?
Okay I know, suck it up now, I went and got a PhD in wise counsel of Other Views, in skilled argumentation and lawful disputation contra All Ideas, even in metaphysical challenges over Alternate Realities. I should be able to do this.
Further, I was also trained as Accommodating Female, if the education isn't enough. I should definitely be able to do this. I can weather all the views, right? No matter what they are? Even if they endanger my own existence and sanity?
Okay Socrates, I get it. Better to take the hemlock than get thrown into the lake. Or burned at the stake.
I really hope I get to live a bit longer, though.
16 JULY 2022