Even You, Abigail?

I don't know about you but I saw Goody Proctor with the devil!

Long before I ever visited, I was decidedly into Salem, Massachusetts. As a child I watched Sabrina The Teenage Witch most weekday mornings between the hours of five and six AM and as an adolescent I studied The Crucible in English classes I took as seriously as I’d imagine a doctor would pore over their career-defining thesis. I famously wrote an essay in which I related the struggles of the accused in the Crucible to the Format’s song I’m Ready, I Am, which I have since never been able to listen to without thinking of John Proctor. Even more than my scholarly attachment to this piece of history, I see glimpses of this tale everywhere today when gossip more akin to folklore spreads like wildfire and leaves the same level of ruin in its wake.

If you’re unfamiliar and needing a crash course: 25 people were killed over the course of a year all because an initial group of girls claimed to be possessed as a result of local women that were alleged witches. None of it was ever true. They simply made it up. As the story snowballed through the town, anyone was able to point the finger at anyone they didn’t like, with witchcraft as their reason. The lucky ones were acquitted after some time, while the others died mostly by public hanging. Unluckier yet, one man was even pressed to death. Today people jest and claim that they’d have been burned at the stake back in the day; most often I find that they would be the ones doing the burning.

Like clockwork I groan when the latest contestant on any dating show has reached the point in the season where they will inevitably be cancelled for tweeting a slur at some point in their 30 years of living, likely from a time when the internet and the concept of its permanence were relatively new. I groan not because I have complete and utter acceptance for slurs but because didn’t you guys see this coming? Don’t you know by now that when you’re on a reality show someone out there will sit on a relatively nominal piece of information about you until 10 episodes in when you have America wrapped around your finger? And don’t you get tired of pretending like it matters so much to you? And even if the question of your innocence is suspended in midair, don’t you know that someone you went to school with and probably talked to twice total will chase after you with a lit match, claiming that you have always been unkind and isn’t that enough to proclaim you guilty?

Btw I have often said that should I ever be cancelled I will enlist the help of internet sleuths to then reply to each of my accusers with photographic proof of a time when they have inevitably done something offensive in the past. Go ahead and cast the first stone baby, you’re perfect!

When you allow any force to be used against others you are setting yourself up for it being used against you in the future. For the townspeople of Salem, it sort of stopped being fun when the finger started being pointed at them. In other words, their obligation to the truth only struck them when their lives were on the line. Eventually the courts decided to rule out spectral evidence, testimony based on dreams/visions/apparitions, forevermore.

There is of course your opinion, and Abigail William’s opinion, and there’s my opinion, and Tituba’s. But then there is the matter of the truth which is absolute. Not only should you want to be honest, you actually have a moral obligation to ensure the things you say are true and to be open to corrections if they are not. If the truth doesn’t align with your opinion you cannot alter the former to make it so. Things cannot be true simply because you want them to be; they may as well be spectral evidence.

Ah, how it feels like no time has passed! Not unlike the accused in Salem I find it interesting that the badness of someone’s crime can be determined by how we generally feel about that person rather than the actual facts of their offenses. Or worse, that a crime is not even necessary when wanting to denounce someone you dislike. And by interesting I mean scary. Totally completely scary. And maybe even more so: the thought that if someone were to do something unsavory that they would have to answer to you, judge and jury, as some sort of arbiter of All Things Good And Holy.

It goes without saying that this doesn’t bode well for me as a purveyor of the truth. I circled the drain over this for awhile today, but more specifically I kept coming back to the realization that the odds would be higher that someone may defend me if someone else were to call me ugly than if the accuser were to claim I was a bad person. Not because I am a bad person, but because a discrepancy in the dogma we believe in would be, to them, reason enough to burn me at the stake. Or to at least allow someone else to do the burning.