What I wish I could say
When I entitled this blog “paved with good intentions” I was thinking about Paul’s and my planning process for our summer institute, and that was what the first post was about, really. But if I substitute the “we” for “I” the whole entry somehow sounds and becomes much more universal, something about the process of entropy and how all things and processes transform into something not necessarily borne of their original intent.
Today, this morning, “paved with good intentions” means something else to me. It’s much more about the current situation in which I find myself. Planning the course is important, but in all honesty, it’s ancillary to the drama that’s been running my life for the past six months. Someday I will perhaps be ready to write openly about it. And although I feel that really I have nothing to lose anymore, something still inhibits me from making a public exhibition of what should have remained a very private matter.
There are times when you try to bring other people to their senses, and they just won’t come along with you. The road to hell conjured by the title of this blog is not my own road to hell — at least not yet. I persist in believing, despite all the odds and the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the intentions of the person of whom I write were, in the beginning (whenever that was), good. However, this person and his cohort are now so thoroughly mired in a narrative of their own making, revolving around the belief that they haven’t done anything wrong despite tangible reams of actual paper which gainsay this notion, that it becomes almost impossible to intervene, other than legally.
Sometimes I think that criminal court is the only way to wake them up. It would be horrible. And it probably wouldn’t even do the job. They are so submerged in the depths of a co-created fantasy of innocence wherein fraud, theft and abuse were somehow simply ends that justified some greater means, that I despair of ever reaching them again. It’s exactly the same sort of thinking engaged in by people who cheat on their income taxes, and say, “everyone does this,” in order to justify themselves. Except that it’s cheating, lying and stealing of a much, much greater magnitude.
