For some reason, and I don't know why, the BBC program has evoked feelings that the Dateline program never did. I think it must have been the cops.
I was raised with few advantages. Single (black) mother, raising six children on her own...
No father. Deep South. Early sixties.
Then--it seemed--Divine Light shone on us. In turn, Sister Boyd and then Sister Bailey brought god's truth to my mother. The great god above in the form of His Humble People came to visit my mother, and us. Door by door they searched for us and found us. There *was* a way out of our misfortune. All was *not* lost, after all. Glory be!
In the mid-seventies, I spent much of my teen years being a nerd... like spending hours during the summer following the Watergate hearings on TV. In other ways and by other means, I came to accept the inability of men to solve humanity's problems. Little by little, everything I'd been led to believe was more or less verified, through the glasses my mother had given me to wear.
The world *was* no good... in need of being replaced.
People *were* mostly bad... worthy of being destroyed.
Or so it seemed.
There's a lot I could say here but more than anything I will say that I cannot escape the underlying sadness I feel. Again. Part of me wants... will always want... The Truth(tm) to be what I always believed it was. Yet, what I once saw as an advantage for me and my siblings turned out to be just another hurdle to overcome, a hurdle that our family is still working very hard to breach.
I find it hard to fight the tears that come as I realize (all over again) that The Truth(tm), too, was nothing but a ruse, a sham, a joke played on my down-and-out family.
Not just my family, but so many others.