The silence is worse than the noise
My father had been taking a breather on a park bench while his grandchildren shopped for summer treasures on this unusually hot-for-Maine day. He heard the announcement before I did. I had been herding one generation of vacationland wanderers towards another and hadn’t noticed my phone alerts going wild.
“I just can’t believe it,” dad exclaimed after I had circled back to him. “I was sitting next to this guy from Boulder who was talking to a girl from Boston, and they were asking me where I was from and when I told them ‘New York’ they said, ‘well, your governor just quit’.”
The phones around us started to crow with the news and I handed mine to my dad so he could read the bulletin for himself.
Despite being a life-long Democrat, Cuomo-the-younger wasn’t my dad’s favorite. It didn’t matter to him what malfeasance finally caught up with the state’s highest-ranking official.
“Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Dad’s beef with the governor wasn’t about the man’s treatment of women. It was about taxes, and the shady ways they are levied. And it focused on one tax in particular: He had asked a question about a charge on my mother’s nursing home bill — a fully-refundable gross receipts tax only private-pay nursing home patients were charged — and it pulled a string that unraveled one of the underhanded ways the state silently slips its hand in a pocket.
“Why would you give the state a no-interest loan if it wasn’t intended to be a swindle?”
The next year, when the refund was capped at two percentage points below what he had paid, my father sued for the difference. He won, but the judgment was again only personal. All the other private-pay nursing home residents that were assessed the tax would have to file lawsuits of their own to get their due.
It may not seem like much — a few hundred dollars tacked onto a bill — but to him, an elderly man watching his wife slowly fade away, it was crime more insidious than armed robbery.
And then when the state misrepresented the numbers of nursing home deaths as a result of COVID last year, he cursed Cuomo and thanked God for taking her before a time when all these souls passed alone.
So I was a bit surprised when my father handed back my phone after reading the news and promptly changed the subject.
“Ok, do you think it looks like rain?”
That’s when I realized what I dreaded most was not the noise, but the silence.
My Twitter feed became a feeding frenzy of expectations as people opined about all the worse crimes they would attribute to the Cuomo name, it seemed clear that sexual harassment is the mail fraud of the modern era. They may not get you on murder, but it’s the charge with teeth.
We seem unable or unwilling to make a distinction between the unpleasantness of an awkward exchange, that should lead to an apology and a behavior change, and the undue difficulty of handling an abuser who exploits those same awkward moments, turning them into a pattern of abuse.
Staying quiet is safer. Abusers know secrecy works to their advantage, too. Rarely do those who speak out find their situations improve. Instead, they enter battles they might be unprepared or ill-equipped to fight. It’s usually easier and safer to stay quiet and move along.
I’m grateful for people who find the strength to speak out. I’m grateful for people who do the thankless job of going against the expectation of silence and the pressure to move on. And I am ultimately hopeful that support for truth and accountability will be harder to suppress in the light of this new day.