The Descent IV

Things started to get even stranger.

I couldn’t understand how any of it was happening. One question kept repeating in my mind: what was wrong with people?

I started a blog. At first, it was simple. I thought if I just told people what was going on, they would care. They would be outraged. Someone in authority would step in. There would be consequences. Maybe people would lose their jobs. Maybe something would change.

For the first time, I wasn’t completely alone in it either. I spoke with a man in Australia who had helped end caning in schools there. There was another woman who had been campaigning against corporal punishment. She had even gotten a congresswoman to introduce a bill to ban it.

It failed.

More than once. It was introduced again and again, and each time it failed. No one seemed interested in ending it. There were other priorities—testing, benchmarks, performance.

I didn’t understand that.

Then I started noticing where we were.

The area we had moved to was poor. Not just financially, but in every visible way. Meth use was common. Alcoholism even more so. Violence between people seemed normal, almost expected. None of this had factored into our decision to move there. I had assumed all places operated on roughly the same baseline. The same basic rules. The same sense of right and wrong.

That wasn’t true.

I started hearing things. The high school principal had married a student as soon as she turned eighteen. Girls told me they had been beaten badly when they were younger. Not casually, not occasionally—regularly. There was no shame around it. If anything, there was pride. It was talked about as discipline, as care, even as love.

Most of the people practicing it were religious. They went to church every Sunday. There was no contradiction for them.

That’s when something else started to come into focus.

Why was any of this allowed?

If a parent caused the kind of injuries these children had, they would lose custody. There would be charges. Intervention. Protection. But inside a school, it was policy. Approved. Structured. Documented.

What was the difference?

Why would a system protect children in one context and allow harm in another? Why would something so obviously damaging be normalized, even defended? It didn’t make sense unless it served some kind of purpose.

I started to wonder what that purpose might be.

Did fear play a role? Did it shape people in ways that made them easier to control? Did it teach them to doubt themselves, to comply, to fall in line? Was that what I was looking at? Was that what had happened to me?

The more I looked, the more I saw it.

Not just in obvious ways, but in small ones. Subtle ones. Enough to make someone second-guess themselves. Enough to disconnect them from something natural and replace it with something learned.

And instead of the fear going away, mine was getting stronger.

There was something fundamentally wrong here. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t fully explain it. And underneath that, there was something else too.

Sadness.

Not for myself. For the children. Sitting there every day, being threatened, learning to live inside that pressure as if it were normal.

I wasn’t going to let that happen to mine.

My mother told me if I didn’t send them to school, they wouldn’t learn how to read or write. I didn’t care. It didn’t seem important if they could read and write but had lost their sense of themselves in the process. I knew what that felt like. I wasn’t going to let anyone take that from them.

So I pulled them out.

I decided to homeschool.

It turned out they didn’t need much from me in that regard. They learned on their own. One of them graduated college later without asking me for help. Just said, “I’ve got this,” and did it.

But by then, the questions had moved past school, past parenting, past society as a whole.

This was something deeper.

And whatever I had stepped into, it wasn’t finished with me.

It was just beginning.