Nefarious Nice People*

Once upon a time, there was a little community of  squeaky-clean, holier-than-thou, nice people at a place they called a ranch, mainly because it used to be a ranch, but now it was just people and buildings -- no ranching, no shit that you could see, no real, shared work (these people were too nice to get their hands dirty). Anyway, on this ranch that wasn't a ranch, more of a fake, sanitized distant memory of a ranch, some of the people wanted it to be so safe that nothing bad would ever happen: cars crept along at two miles per hour, all tools had to be covered in foam, children wore bullet-proof chonies. But there were back-room dealings, nasty gossipers, and finger-wagging zealots who found flaws in anyone a little bit different. So when there was a whisper that something was amiss, when one of them pointed to a meanness between them, inside them, the others decided to shut her up, good. They said she was crazy and brought in witnesses to testify that her character was dangerous to children, puppies, bunnies, and words that rhyme. They took words she said and twisted them into evil biting things. Then they said she did things that she did not do. They pointed fingers, invoked a tribal hunting grunt. The nice people called in the goons, formed a posse, a lynch mob, a witch hunt and decided to shun the one who had whispered the truth that they were not -- in actuality -- safe, fair, inclusive, generous, nice, or all that honest. That they had a well-disguised mean streak that grew out their own fears was a reality they could not bear. But the truth, being what it was, found a way back in. It entered by the side doors when no one was looking. It pulled back the curtain cloaking all the tricks: the ad hominem attacks, the hasty generalizations, the quotes taken out of context, the outright lies. Fear, it revealed, had become mean, hostile, murderous. Truth shone a light on the twisting fears, and those fears retreated back into the darkness from which they had come, vowing to return, just as soon as the fear of harm drove the people to again look for someone to blame for things being just the other side of controllable.

* Dedicated to D.M., S.D., H.C., and, mostly, S.V.