Helplessness
You may thing at times that no-one listens to you, and that you’re powerless in a world of giant corporations and national politics far removed from your everyday life. But true helplessness isn’t being unable to prevent a war, or cure a serious disease. Those are events that take enormous powers to change, and it is to be expected that an individual will have little influence. Being truly helpless is being unable to affect the things you should be able to change. True powerlessness is being unable to make you father think twice about lifting that belt; or being unable to prevent your husband from interfering with his pretty young stepdaughter.
True powerlessness is watching your brother going out night after night, trying to get into the gang that hates him for being too middle class. Our sweet kid can see what her brother is doing, but she can’t see where it will end. She’s not so full of insight that she can predict the difficult end that is possibly to come. She’s simply a very good person, and she can see bad happening.
But she can’t stop it; her brother doesn’t listen to her. Her father doesn’t speak to her; and her mother doesn’t think of her as anything other than “her little Cass.” She’s so frustrated with them all she wants to scream, but experience has taught her that this won’t help.
It’s not that they don’t care; her brother sees a little sister who needs protecting from the big bad world. Her father hardly sees her at all; he’s too busy trying to provide for the whole family to be able to get to know them. And her mother is unwilling to watch her children grow up, and would prefer to pretend that they aren’t.
Being truly helpless is like shouting at the TV, except that there’s no reassurance that the scriptwriters have things all in hand, there’s simply the horrible feeling that the train has left the station, but there’s something wrong with the line.
Our sweet kid knows that things have gone wrong, but no one’s listening to her.