My Story: Michael Totten

TITLE: My Story: Michael Totten

AUTHOR: Michael Totten

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH granted by the author.  All rights reserved.

Michael Totten has been professionally immersed for the past 50 years in working against humanity's rape and brutalization of Mother Earth/Gaia. In 1988-9, he drafted the first comprehensive climate action bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. A decade later, he received the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. In 2005 Totten co-led the development, testing and promoting of the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standards - considered the gold standard for land-based carbon offsets.

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It was now clear to me. I had started writing letters to Sam by way of Brian's house. Sam must have hidden them in his desk, which my father had rummaged and found. For a split second I was angry with Sam for keeping them in the house, and for my dad's violation of Sam's private space. Then I was lost in a momentary revery on the letters.

I had needed someone close to me to share my changing thoughts and feelings. The biggest change was my doubt about becoming a lawyer. Only Sam would understand how traumatic it was for me to realize that I didn't want to spend my life in court. He had experienced a similar breach of faith in deciding to abandon the idea of becoming a doctor. Ever since we both could first comprehend words as infants, my father had been drilling into us the fact that Sam was going to be a doctor and I was going to be a lawyer.

All of this stemmed from my father's blind ambition gone awry. He wasthe failed son of an eminent surgeon, and he was going to prove his own success by raising two successful sons in the two careers that he had long ago abandoned after failed attempts.

Sam had paid mercifully for his aborted medical career. It had begun years ago, as far back as elementary school. Each report card period was a nightmare in our household. I would arrive with nearly straight A's, while Sam's would be riddled with D's and F's. It became a standard routine - almost always in the evening at the dinner table -for my dad to ridicule little Sam, badgering and belittling him with the same question over andover again: why couldn't he be like his younger brother? Little Sam would try to give a response, but my dad would scream at him not to make excuses. My dad's twisted reasoning left little Sam with no way to adequately answer the question, causing his sad little face to begin quivering uncontrollably in its effort to hold back his tears.

The quivering always ignited my father's wrath. "You want to cry?" he would taunt little Sam. "I'll give you something to cry about." Then he would viciously beat the poor little kid until his face and entire back were swollen with welts and cuts.  The beatings were supposed to "instill the holy terror" in Sam to perform better, but they had just the opposite effect. By high school it was apparent that Sam was not destined for medical school. Although my dad had accepted this reality, he continued to beat Sam every report card period, and had taken to consistently using Sam as a scapegoat for every inferior feeling of failure.

All during this time, I received almost the opposite treatment. I quickly learned that good grades were vital to insure against being physically abused (at least at report card time). I was seized by the holy terror, and worked diligently to do the best I could.

Sam's failures and my successes had a peculiar effect upon my father. He seemed to condition Sam for failure by setting up impossible tasks around the house that a young, inexperienced kid was bound to fail at. Then my father would brutalize him for not having carried out the order perfectly. I inevitably got some of these same orders, and brutal punishing, but I also got constant praise for my achievements. But the most peculiar dynamic was that, as Sam sank lower in the eyes of my father, I was put onto a higher and higher pedestal. I was ordered to achieve more and more, just as Sam was set up to fail more and more. By the time I got to high school I was one of the top 10 students of my class - getting a B was grounds for a beating. I was captain of the track team each year and school record holder in the sprints - but attacked by my father for not making it further in the state championships. I was junior and senior class president - but berated for not winning the student body presidency. I was an Eagle Boy Scout and president of the town Explorer Scouts Post. I was founder and president of a youth council set up to counter the heavy drug use that was occurring in town. I was in a half-dozen school c1ubs, inc1uding the debate team, editor for the school newspaper, and an organizer of fund-raising events. For these achievements I was voted by the faculty to attend Boys State, by my classmates "Most Likely To Succeed," and by the town newspaper as "Teen of the Year." They also won me a “young leaders” scholarship that paid my tuition and board at college - and, to my overwhe1ming surprise, entrance to the unthinkable: Yale University.

It was all expected by my father,but also never enough. By the time I left for college I was loaded down with the imponderable mission of becoming (a) a millionaire by the time I was twenty-five, and (b) a lawyer and U.S. Senator. I was to be the rich and powerful lawyer my dad always wanted to be but gave up trying to be years ago. At least one successful son would prove to the world that Harold P. Totten Jr. was a successful father. And now I was depriving him of this vicarious yet very real thrill. I was threatening to shatter his dream. I was destroying his fatherhood. I was saying I didn't need him or his vision. In his eyes, I was a selfish traitor. He just couldn't see my side of it. Didn't want to begin to understand the changes triggered by the explosion of learning I was experiencing at Yale.

No, there was some primordial fear welling up in my father that my actions had evoked, and he was taking revenge. Those morsels of thoughts that I had found so nourishing were poisonous to the core for him. My transgression was no simple thing. I wasn’t some errant little kid who had gorged himself on stolen apples from the orchard. No, I was even worse than the proverbial rotten apple. I had turned into some foreign body, a contagious viral contaminant that threatened the whole family.

My dad's body twitched as he sat on the edge of his chair, leaning towards me. "You destroyed my meaning, you heartless bastard. I worked my ass off for this family, and now you do this to me. Stripped me of everything. I decided to commit suicide. Then I realized it wasn't just me who should die. All of us should die. This family shouldn't exist. This nightmare has to be ended. And especially you, because you hate me. You hate me so much you had to be vindictive and destroy me. Well, you succeeded. Succeeded not only in destroying me but breaking down our family. So, I'm going to exterminate all of us."

 As I sat there mute and defenseless, I thought how ironic that my recent growth at Yale had unwittingly planted the seeds for my untimely death. My newly acquired thirst for learning had desiccated my father's sense of meaning. He flung at me one accusation after another about my egotistical self-worship. I sank deeper into a black pit of reeling nothingness. I only heard fragments of what was being charged, but the fragments were dredging up past nightmarish incidents to which Sam and my mom and I had been subjected.

"Yes," I thought to myself," I do hate you. I hate you more than the devil that churchgoers fear. You've never been a true father to us, or a real husband to my mom. You've been a sadistic slaveowner who only saw fit to abuse us because we were your property. You're a torturer, not a nurturer. An alien, not an ally. Yes, I despise you and yes, I wish you a slow gruesome death, many times over. I hate you, hate you, hate you..." My thoughts sank deeper and deeper, down into the darkness of my bowels, and I felt the weight of doom closing tighter and tighter around my last clear thoughts.

I was there in that dark cavern of a living room only as a hollow shell of a body, with facial grimaces sufficient to keep my father at bay. I had only a vague awareness that Sam had started talking. It was more the gentleness of his tone that caught my attention. His words had a mellifluous quality, a soft lilting sound filled with kindness and caring. I was too deeply lost in my own grotesque revery to make sense of what Sam was saying. But obviously it was having an impact; my father had stopped talking for the moment. You would think that such a shift in mood would have quickly brought me out of my catatonic stupor. It's a gruesome image, but I truly believe I had crawled into my coffin. I felt like the cadaver whose fixed eyes looked out blankly from the grave, waiting for the coffin top to be set down upon him and the dirt shoveled in to seal the grave for eternity. I was not entertaining any messages by this point. I was now but a passive viewer of long forgotten, emotionally graven images that had been sealed away in my memory over the years. Like key words calling up citations from a database, the fragmented words that were picked up from my dad's accusations had unearthed old family scenes, inflicted wounds, that had been painfully repressed for years.

But now I was being turned in a different direction, albeit slowly. Sam must have talked for a long, long time, because it was nighttime before my body really began responding to what he was accomplishing.  It wasn't Sam's words that were doing it as much as his inflection. At first it was the simple change from my father's staccato, rapid-fire recriminatory tone to Sam's harmonious cadence. I felt it in the shift of images that began to course before me, interrupting the ugly images that had taken hold of my mind.

Sam’s sonorous voice broke like waves over me, bathing me in past memories where my brother's voice had had that exact same loving affirmation. I was now three years old, and Sam and I were both in a hospital to have our tonsils removed. I was crying my eyes out because I couldn’t reach the candy box my mom had brought me. Sam tried to soothe me from across the room, then finally leapt out of bed, ran over and got the candy for me. This calmed me down. And now I was five years old, and Sam was rocking me in his arms. We had been sent to the bedroom after a beating during which we had watched my dad pin my mom to the ground while holding a gun to her head. It was Sam the shining angel, whose love so outshined the hatred surrounding him. His love was a magic tonic that protected against the malignant beast who reared its hideous head in those blackest hours.

A flicker of hope shot up in me. My ugly duckling of a brother was amazing grace incarnate. The more he talked the more vibrant and vigorous became the tone.  The mood kept shifting, ever so small, incrementally, away from the stygian gloom perilously close to engulfing the whole family.

I could hear my mom freely crying. It was no longer the horrible animal sounds I had heard earlier. These were very different tears - tears evoked by Sam's words and images and sound. The tears resonated through my body, cascading into strong vivid memories of rare moments during the past 18 years when all four of us had brief glimpses of what our family could have and should have been all about.

I am three years old again, and on my father's massive shoulders. It is a hot summer day and we are in the ocean. Seemingly huge waves come rushing towards us, breaking over my father's shoulders. But my father stands solid as a mighty oak tree, with me firmly in grip; the wave passes by, an effervescent wall of water whirlpooling round my legs and then subsidizing. I shriek and scream with glee, tugging at my daddy's ears and hair, jumping up and down with joy and excitement at the next forming wave. I wave to mommy, standing on the shore, whose look is a mixture of fierce pride at her husband and little son with a tinge of concern at how safe it all is. Little Sam scampers and scurries along the shoreline, clumsily trying to gather the sudsy foam before the spent wave disappears with the receding waters.

Something profound is going on. Sam has gone deep into primordial waters and brought back something truly wondrous. He has tapped the significance of what it is my dad truly wants: love. And my mom's tears are saying hallelujah. That is what she has stood for through all these years of putting up with my father's physical abuse: love. She has endured insufferable pain because she vanquished it with an even deeper, indomitable belief in love conquering all. Her spirit has been broken today, overwhelmed by our home having become a torture chamber. But Sam, in some miraculous way, is painting with his words a powerful and restorative vision. The living room has taken on the quality of a sacred grove where love reigns supreme and all life is accorded respect and cherished.

I slowly emerge from my inner retreat and am visibly shaken to see tears streaming down my father's cheeks. The gun hangs limp in his hand. He is locked into a silent dialogue with Sam, listening intently and weighing each of Sam's words. Hatred has melted away. Nothing could have changed that steely-cold madness except one thing: pure love.

"Look dad," Sam is saying, "it probably is the best thing for me to move out. That's a positive thing for me to start living on my own. It should be a new beginning for all of us, growing together and caring about each other as we each continue growing in our respective way." Sam's head bobs in affirmation, positively punctuating each point he makes.

My dad bursts into tears, bawling like a baby. His body turns to a huge lump of jelly. As he slumps over to cry his guts out, he tosses the gun to Sam. Everybody is now crying, each for a different mix of reasons, but all of us certainly crying out of a jagged relief that a wicked spell has been lifted.

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Sam Totten has become one of the world's foremost experts on man's inhumanity to man. A Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arkansas, he has documented the oral histories of genocide survivors around the world. He has also delivered truckloads of food to people under mass murder attack (e.g., South Sudan).