Excerpt from Endgame

Two Dreams (p. 321)

From chapter "Courage"

I had two dreams. In the first, my father came to my home. I did not want him here. He began to throw rocks at me. I tried to evade the rocks and did not throw any back. His daughter in the dream, who was not my sister, approached me. She spoke. She was pregnant, she said. Her father, my father, was the fetus’s father. She was unable to bring herself to have an abortion. This would, she said, be an act of violence she could not commit. Nor could she bear to give birth to this product of rape. She could not bear to continue her father’s lineage. Her only choice, she said, was to kill herself. She saw that as the only way to stop the horror that her parent had perpetrated upon her, and to stop the product of that horror growing inside of her.

Two thoughts came to me as I slept. First I noticed that it never occurred to her or to me in the dream to kill her father, my father, nor did she abort the baby, kill her father inside of her, and begin to live her life anew, free from him and his rapes. The second was to recognize that this is of course what we as a culture are doing. We so identify with the poisonous processes that have been forcibly implanted inside of us by our ancestors that we see no way to remove them save suicide. To kill the oppressors, and even to kill their influences they’ve implanted in us would be a violence we must avoid at all costs. And so we kill ourselves and the world with us. Somehow we do not perceive this as violence.