The Burdens We're Forced to Carry

A few months ago Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom posted a thread about power dynamics and inbalances in education and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It made me think all summer after reading it and I kep this in  mind as I rethought my interactions, policies, and boundaries with students. I admit I've fallen short a couple of times, I think one of the effects of the pandemic is that it's easy to feel like teachers and students are in this together, this communal trauma and it's sometimes hard to balance wanting to show students that we get it and not placing a burden on them. I also think it's complicated because as others have mentioned autistic people show empathy and sympathy by sharing what they have also gone through. But I have reoriented my approach to keep these power dynamics in mind and while I'm a work in progress (always) I am happy with the changes I've made.

But today I was reminded of this thread for different reasons. Yesterday news broke of 

"A two-year investigation by @AJIUnit reveals how British universities are failing to protect students from sexual harassment by their lecturers, allowing them to carry on teaching even where there are multiple complaints over many years. #NotOK"

My Twitter feed has been full of amplifications of this story, as people share that abusers in our academic fields are a known evil that administrations have just chosen not to do anything about, and the notable absence of voices from women, scholars, who have claimed in the past to stand for and advocate for women in various fields.

The fact that men are allowed to abuse, harass, stalk, and otherwise groom and make miserable the lives of women who are their students, advisees, mentees, is awful, horrific, disgusting. The fact that universities choose again and again to protect, shield, keep employing these men at the expense of their students and faculty is just evil.

This post is not about that. But it is about how these same systems do daily, ongoing damage to women, to faculty, staff, and students.

Returning to Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom's thread, I keep thinking of all the ways men who are bosses do this to the women that work under them. How too often they want to appear to be jovial, accessible, a "pal" but in order to do this they totally ignore the power dynamics putting the women who report to them in awful positions. Maybe it's men who tell us that we can be honest, tell them the truth, but if you do and it's something they don't want to hear or mentions any issues, how quickly they turn on you, snapping at you, losing their temper, or perhaps ignoring you or being short with you, and these are the lighter end of the consequences. Maybe a continuation of this is they insult you, put you down, are just flat out mean or nasty but do it under the excuse that they're "joking" because they're just like us. And you can't do anything about it because they are your boss and as they've shown, if you say anything you know you'll pay for it.

Or maybe your boss wants us all to feel like we're the same, or that they're just like us, deal with the same issues and challenges we do, so they share information you shouldn't have any knowledge of. it's presented as a "we're all in this together" and is usually done by men who proudly claim to be allies, and this performative act is part of them showing you that. But the effect is you now have to carry the burden of knowing things about the interactions of upper level people, administration, your boss, their bsos, that you can't do anything with, but weighs you down. And you can't tell your boss that it's inappropriate to share these things because again, you'll pay for it.

Men think they're being clever, funny, showing they're personable, approachable. But what they're being is unprofessional. They are showing a shocking lack of awareness of the power dynamics and the effects of their actions on the people, especially the women, who work for them. They are piling on and piling on all this weight onto women without even noticing letting alone caring.

A related aspect of this are the men, usually white, usually tenured, who won't use their privilege or position to stand up for a single thing, won't make the hard comments or arguments, will watch the limb creaking under you as you advocate for yourself, others, your students, and say nothing. But they'll be more than happy to email you privately, choose private chat, text you, and tell you how right you are, how they're on your side, how unfair it all is. But this too is a burden. You have to carry their performative acts. You're expected to give them a cookie because they're doing something even though we know it's nothing. You're expected to listen and nod. Worse, you're expected to be grateful for them. 

In my experience this is worse in education. So much awfulness is excused under the guise that we're "a family" and so much additional, unpaid labor is asked of us "for the kids." As we've seen highlighted during the pandemic it seems so easy for so many to demonize teachers and staff for asking for the bare minimum in safe working conditions. If you ask for breaks, things to protect your health, basic decency, you're a greedy, selfish person who is willing to let the poor children suffer for your selfishness. 

I think it's even worse still in higher education. Professors, departments, bosses in higher education add to the "we're all family" rhetoric but add a perverted sense of entitled jargon, claiming to be Marxist, claiming they care about labor issues, equity, lifting people up, supporting them, but it is all performance art. None of it is real. It's not SEEN. They continue to ask you to do more with less, and be happy with what you get. Especially during the pandemic we've seen educators asked to work on increasingly ridiculous and unsafe conditions, yet how many have heard that "we're all in this together" and "we care about you" while doing nothing to actually make our lives better. How many women have seen their workloads increase, the amount of crap they have to deal with increase, as so many of their colleagues, mostly men, found ways to just not be around when there was work to be done. How many women have continued to sepeak up in committee meetings, screaming into a void while we're gaslit for bringing issues up, to only be the only person speaking.

Women at work end up having to carry so many burdens, especially in education. We end up carrying the burden of the invisible labor we're asked to do. We have to carry the expectations of maternal care we're supposed to conform to. We're expected to conform to cultural and societal expectations of what we're supposed to look and act and talk like. These burdens are worse for women of color, trans and queer women.

It's exhausting. It'x anxiety producing. It creates toxic work environments. And as we've seen again and again there's no help for us. No support. No one to turn to. We all recognize these are the realities. We all nod our heads as we read these stories. But nothing ever changes. The institutions and structures protect their own, and women are not part of the club.

Trauma is cumulative and one thing stories like yesterday's, and all the others I've read over the years, decades, show is that nothing changes. Or change occurs in ONE place, is heralded as "progress" and is used as an excuse why everyone else, everywhere else, can just keep doing what they're doing.

In the Supergirl episode "Red Faced" Cat Grant tells Kara, "You apologize too much, which is a separate, although not unrelated, problem. No, this is about work. And anger. Whatever you do, you cannot get angry at work, especially when you're a girl."

And what choice do we have? None. Absolutely none. You can leave, but that's another burden placed on us, we're asked to give up what we've worked so hard for because of men. We're asked to rearrange our lives because the men cannot act in very simple, easy, professional ways.  And leaving is not an option for a lot of people. You need the job, the benefits, you have people who depend on you, you have debt. So we smile as we're insulted. There's the additional burden that if we're the only, or one of the few, advocating and speaking up in our situations, what happens if we leave? So guilt becomes another burden.

So we keep showing up to work. We don't lose our tempers, because occassionally we have, and we've been dismissed, called "crazy" or "hysterical" and told by our male bosses that it's just not acceptable, of course all in a tone that lets us know that they're going easy on us, because we're friends, but we still need to adjust our attitudes, mainly because it reflects badly on them, and we can't have that. 

Maybe we fall for being told things will be different, or maybe we convince ourselves that THIS time on a committee will be different, THIS time we'll DO something, that at some point, someone has got to put students first and care, right?

We are Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football. We fall for it again and again. We get weighed down, slump more and more, have more energy drained from us each semester and year, we often sacrifice our personal health and lives in order to deal with all this, carry all this weight. 

But nothing ever gets better. We run out of energy. We just stop working, contributing, speaking up. Maybe we quit. Certainly we become less than, fainter, less substantial than we first were, how we started. 

And the most infuriating thing is that it's all such a simple fix. 

All men who are bosses have to do is stop. Stop complaining to the people who work for you about your issues. Stop complaining to them about how admin or your bosses treat you, putting your employees in impossible situations. Stop acting familiar with your employees but then snapping when they do the same making the workplace and interactions impossible to navigate. Stop burdening your employees with your personal information. We are not your friends. We are not your equals. You are shoving these burdens on us and we have no choice except to take them until we buckle and then you keep doing it. We try to avoid you and limit contact but because you want to be seen as everyone's friend you come looking for us, because your performative acts don't work unless you have an audience. And you're hurt and you pout and you throw tantrums when we have the audacity to ask if you need something, to try and turn back to our work, to not answer the email, the chat, the text. 

We are stuck in this system that seems to actively hate and devalue us every day, in large and small weighs, burdening us with things that we don't want, need, or care about. A system that does not let us change things, does not listen to us, does not value our work. And everywhere, the men, insisting they are allies, insisting they care, insisiting they advocate with us, and yet we constantly have to remind them that this is an issue, that no, they don't get a cookie, and pay the price, or we sit back and take it and internalize it.

I don't have much hope about anything these days. I've noticed it especially the last couple of years. I think part of it is everything going on. I think a lot of it is this is my twentieth year teaching and nothing has changed. It's the same shit over and over- high schools, public, online, rural, online, big research universities, and smaller institutions. I see the same things over and over in articles and on social media, we're all stuck in this loop it seems no matter where we are.

Think About Whose Comfort Your Classroom Centers

"The word hygge comes from a Danish word meaning "to give courage, comfort, joy". Hygge stems from hyggja which means “to think” in Old Norse."

The last couple of years of the Covid-19 pandemic I've seen a lot of pieces talking about embraxing maximalism and comfort in homes many people were confined to, both a reaction against the minimalism trend and a way of finding in comfort in a personal space when there was none to find in the outside world.

I've been thinking a lot of about what care and comfort looks like in education, how gendered the perception of care is, how there are certain cultural and societal expectations of what care should look like. Yesterday I wore my SmartWool thick socks and was reminded of how much I love soft, comforting things. How they can make the difference between me being able to deal with a day or not. There's a reason why so many of us come home from work and the first thing we do is get into comfortable clothes. 

But what does comfort look like in education? Whose comfort gets centered and privileged by the institution?

Most of the time the system defaults to privileging the comfort of the professor, with topics, policies, conversations. I think too a lot of the problems in education can be traced back to professors and teachers becoming too comfortable with something- their way of teaching, the texts they teach, the work they'll accept, what may start as comfort becomes fossilized, impossible to change based on new information or experience, frozen in time, incapable of doing anything else. This is always at the detriment of our students and communities. 

The majority of people learn the most from what they get wrong, experimenting, exploring. But as research on grades and ungrading has illustrated if the system privileges comfort, what is known, above experimenting and learning, you're going to end up with the exact same results over and over again.

Teachers and professors teach the same texts and lessons and assignments semester after semester, year after year, sometimes decade after decade. This disregards the fact that new information, new scholarship should be reflected in what we teach. It disregards the fact that we have different students, in a different world, every semester. I think for a lot of teachers and professors they continue to do what is comforting because it doesn't challenge anything, it doesn't rock the boat, it doesn't move the goal post or expect anything different. They also do what is comfortable because it centers them, keeps them in control. Telling students that this semester is different from last because of world events opens the door to conversations about WHAT those events are.Telling students that you're changing, altering a text or approach because it's not working shows students teachers and professors are fallible, don't always get it right. Letting go of control in the classroom can be very scary for some people.

I was struck by the end of the definition of "hygge," the history of it, because I like the idea of thinking about what makes us comfortable in the classroom, what makes us uncomfortable, whose comfort we're centering and why. Even having the conversation about comfort is a privilege, assumes that a host of issues and topics are NOT a concern. Only certain teachers or professors get to be comfortable as their default. How different does education look if teachers and professor centered their students' comfort?

Midnight Mass's Deal with the Devil: People Never Learn

Needful Things came out in 1993, another chapter in the separate but connected universe of Stephen King adaptations. At its core it's a "deal with the devil" narrative. Leland Gaunt, the storekeeper of Needful Things offers the exact thing all the townspeople of Castle Rock need for little cost, his  knowledge of exactly WHAT they need informed by an uncanny and unexplained knowledge of their and the town's history. As with all deals with the devil the cost is higher than first advertised. For the residents of Castle Rock their obsession with defending what they've gained at all cost results in horrific acts of violence. Everyone's secrets slowly unravel, their paranoia and desire pushing the townspeople to increasingly terrible acts against people they'd known their whole lives.

Like many of King's tales it is about humankind not just revealing the worst about themselves but how easily, for how little, they're willing to turn against their better instincts for a little gain. Also typical of King's novels there is a sliver a light and goodness, a hope that people as a whole can be saved, here in the form of Sheriff Alan Pangborn.  Yet even Sheriff Pangborn is not immune to the downward pull exerted by Gaunt and his charms. While Pangborn suspects him, he is ineffectual at breaking free until his girlfriend Polly realizes what is happening and breaks the spell, literally, giving up her arthritis-pain free life. Pangborn is able to free the trapped souls of the townspeople but Gaunt gets away, implying that the cycle will continue, because after all, as long as people are willing to take the deal, there will be a devil to make it.

As the plot progresses it shows people attacking, killing each other, over pettier and pettier things. By the end a fight is over another man taking his copy of Treasure Island when they were kids.

By the end "all hell has broken loose" which is the predictable end for when the devil comes to your town. The church is on fire, buildings blow up, people are rioting and looting in the streets, the local priest is seconds away from murder.

Enter Gaunt, on his vantage point of the porch of Needful Things, encouraging Pangborn to shoot, to kill. The narrative argues that the choice of a single good person can change the trajectory of events. Pangborn explains that Gaunt's mission is to get them to destroy themselves. Pangborn asks the townspeople to confess to everyone what they've done for their "needful thing." He argues that they're all good people, that somehow their weaknesses, how quickly they were willing to commit horrific acts doesn't make them bad, it is the devil's fault. Their confessions end up following the pattern of "He made me..." A convenient fiction, "the devil made me do it." It absolves them all of any responsibility.

The movie ends with Gaunt telling the townspeople to take responsibility for themselves, he stresses that he offers what he offers, and people make up their own minds. "Free will, it is a bitch" as John Milton says. 

Danforth "Buster" Keaton, the town's head selectman, refuses to take responsibility, wanting Gaunt to confess to killing his Myrtle and when he refuses Buster leaps on him, detonating the bomb vest he's wearing, and a fiery explosion that destroys the shop and presumably, Gaunt.

Except you can't kill the devil, and at least in part the lesson here is you can't kill him because somewhere, someone, has a need, a want for him and what he offers.

As Pangborn walks up to the smoking crater, Gaunt emerges from the smoke and rubble unharmed. Untouched, literally, from the events.

Gaunt admits this has not been his best work, but lets Pangborn know his future before driving off. No one stops him, the townspeople seem stunned as they move out of the way of his car leaving town. Depending on how you view humankind, I guess you can argue for the better nature of the townspeople prevailing, but from my perspective it's just dumb fucking luck.

1993 was not a year that provided much proof of the better nature of humankind. , In April there was the Waco siege. The first World Trade Center bombing occurs. An anti-abortion activist murders Dr. David Gunn outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Rodney King testifies at the federal trial of four LA police officers who beat him. Two were later acquitted. The other two were sentenced to 30 months of prison. The war between Bosnia and Herzegovina was in its second year. A virus in the Four Corners kills thirteen people, an outbreak of the hantavirus kills thirty-two. An epidemic caused by contaminated water in Milwaukee hospitalizes more than 4,000 and kills more than a hundred people. Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., and Jason Baldwin (the West Memphis Three) are accused of being Satanists, and would later be tried and convicted pretty much on this lie alone. 

Yet 1993 was seen as many as a golden time. People praised what they saw as Clinton's "progressive" values, and he was considered a win against conservative Republicans and their policies. While it's a comforting fiction for some it is just that. Clinton has proved over and over again, then and now, that he's not even capable of performing lip service or pretending to feel bad about his sexual predatory behavior, what happened with Rwanda, Kosovo, the 1994 crime bill, just to name a few.

I would like to think that no one would argue that 2021 is a golden time, that a global pandemic, totally avoidable death and loss, worldwide callousness, a world literally on fire, the rejeection of truth and science more a norm that anyone wants to admit...the list of how the last two, three, four, five (keep counting) years have been a varied hellscape of almost unimaginable horror and evil never seems to end and there is no end in sight.

The argument that "less evil than X" is the same as "good" is a hell of an argument to make. A refusal to admit or address accusations of women against you,  a refusal to admit to generational harm done by a racist crime bill, a contuation of decades ofracist warmongering, "We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay," only being willing to go so far on progressive issues despite a majority and mandate, a non-apology apology to Anita HIll, "I'm sorry for what she endured," totally ignoring the impact THEIR role in this, are we sensing a pattern?

Less evil is not good. It's just less evil.

So perhaps it is not suprising that when I was watching Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan's latest horror limited series, that all I could think of was the parallel to Needful Things. 

It's not hard to imagine Crockett Island, population 127, as a paler, more desolate, version of one of King's Maine towns, a parallel a lot of critics recognized. Once again British Columbia stands in for Everytown, America, something I've always found odd, and wonder if the "America but not" aesthetics of British Columbia are inherently spooky or if viewers are just conditioned to view it that way after decades of it appearing as a character in Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Supernatural, and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, just to name a few.

Midnight Mass provides a sideways answer to a question raised in 1995's The Prophecy, "A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?" It's episode three before Father Paul reveals that he is really a restored Monsignor Pruitt, returned to his town, his people who he loves so much, bringing what he justifies as a gift, the gift of everlasting life, conveniently available during the Lenten season, so all may be resurrected on Easter. But the miracle becomes a curse during the Easter Vigil and by sunrise on Easter morning, everyone is dead.

The internal logic and reality of the show asks you to buy that Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt is a true believer who misreads a vampire (a word not used in the whole series) he encounters in Jerusalem as an angel, that he brings the angel and his gifts back to the Crock Pot so he can share his blessings with his beloved congregation. But that's not actually what the show asks us to believe. The clue is in episode three with Father Paul confessing to the viewer his intention to sin, thus placing the events before the main action of the first episode. A key aspect of confession is that you have to have contrition, you have to resolved not to repeat the sin, and Father Paul is lacking in both. He does not believe this, he explains in his confession that he is sorry for his lie, then corrects himself, the lie he WILL tell, so he knows it's wrong, but he does it anyway. He has no sorrow for his sin he justifies it, he examines his conscience and decides he knows better. He also does no penance for his sin in part because he does not see what he does as a sin.

This is the first clue that Father Paul does not actually believe. True believers do not game the system, they do not look for loopholes. There's an earlier clue in "Book II: Psalms" when Sarah confesses to her date that Father Paul is looking at her the same way Monsignor Pruitt used to. Sarah says she thinks it is because he knew she was gay and was judging her. It's revealed in "Book VII: Revelation" that he looks at her all the time because she is his daughter. Father Pruitt admits to Mildred that the real reason he brought the angel back to Crockett Island was because he did not want to watch Mildred die, he wanted a do-over where he and Mildred and Sarah could all be a family. Mildred tells him that she was never going to leave her husband, come to him with Sarah, and ask him to abandon the collar, the Church, so they could all leave and live together. Mildred tells him she wasn't going to ruin four lives. What is left unsaid but the audience gets is that Father Paul was willing to destroy everyone's lives, all the people he swore he loved and cared for, in order to fulfill his selfish wish.

There are no good people in the Crock Pot. Some are more evil, some are less, but no one is good. Annie and Ed Flynn don't ask any questions of their aging reversing, their total faith in Father Paul and the institution of the Church absolves them of questioning any of it. Wade and Dolly have similar reactions and use as further proof/excuse the healing of their daughter Leeza who is also not innocent, accepting her gift and immediately using it in the propaganda routine of the Church in the community. Wade and Dolly become early active participants as does Sturge, conspiring with Father Paul and Bev, hiding bodies. Warren and Oooker and Ali buy drugs and sneak out of their houses at night, their hypocrisy highlighted by Warren and Oooker serving as altar boys and Ali praying with his father. There is often not a lot of explanation for what converts many of the townsfolk, one scene Sturge is in the background, the next he's getting rid of Joe's body with Wade. The implication is the move to evil, how quickly they all start doing horrific things, is the answer, it is a condemnation that man is inherently evil. Ed and Annie have a conversation at the end about feeling hungry but not giving in, not letting this make them into something they're not. Yet the series also ends with the remaining townspeople singing a hymn together, having apparently learned nothing.

There are no good people on Crockett Island and no reward for choosing good. Joe shot Leeze and paralyzed her, yet remains in a drunken state on the island, a form of penance he confesses, that it didn't feel right for him to just leave. When Leeze tells him she hates him but forgives him, Joe seeks out the AA meeting at the rec center and starts to work on his sobriety, make a chance for the better. His reward for trying to do better is for Father Paul to kill him and eat him when Joe comes to him for help in a moment of weakness. Riley is also punished for trying to do good. Riley tries to find a way through, to figure out what his future is. He rekindles a friendship, then a romance with Erin Greene, he talks to her, is there for her. He helps his dad on the crab boat. He attends his AA meetings with Father Paul. He serves as a model for Joe as he works on his sobriety.

The way the series opens leads the audience to believe that this is a tale that will focus on Riley, he's the one we see handcuffed by the side of the road reciting the Lord's Prayer as he stares at the body of the young woman he killed by driving drunk. It's her body, complete with the evidence of his crime, glass from the car reflecting the lights of police and EMT vehicles, that haunts him every time he tries to rest, with nothing changing from his first night in prison to his return home after he's been released. Riley is our introduction to Crockett Island, it sets up the age of his parents, the abandoned nature of the town, the isolation and rejection he experiences because he's a murderer, a fact he does nothing to escape.

Riley is not granted the Angel's grace on purpose although Father Paul argues it was God's will Riley came along when he did while Riley admits it is because he caught him in a lie. Riley's death in "Book V: Gospels" could be misread as honorable, as sacrifice for the greater good. But it too is an illusion. He gets what he wants, he gets his dream on the boat with the sun coming up, he gets forgiven by the young woman he killed. He does not save Erin, he does not help her. He burdens her with terrible information she can't do anything with, places her in a horrific situation, and then absolves himself of all responsibility, and leaves. He does not stay and fight, he does not do anything to stop the events of Easter Vigil. He leaves amends letters for his family but he doesn't do anything to protect them. He doesn't gather as many innocent people as he can find, including Erin, and put them on his dad's boat and take them all to safety.

Riley's death only reveals and reinforces the lie of sacrifice. It highlights that hypocrites say and think one thing while doing another. Riley only serves himself at the end. This selfishness is seen at the end of the series. Once the congregation starts to turn after their deaths they turn first to feed on their friends and family in the church. Later in front of the rec center they confess to killing wives, children, parents, and there is a shock, but no remorse. What Father Paul calls earlier with Riley a form of grace, to not feel guilt. It did not take much for the townspeople to undo decades of love and relationships and history. 

In the series there is active and passive evil, and really except for Bev all of the evil is passive, it is couched and presented in other, justifiable forms. People make excuses for their behavior, they present their actions as logical. In the end it's clear they are just excuses, evidence that the characters are one decision or push away from pure evil, unwilling to do what is right, and at their core, horrific human beings. Hassan doesn't listen to Sarah, privileging his own desire for belonging, hiding, over the safety of the townspeople he's been entrusted with. It's unsurprising given his earlier conversation with Joe where he admits that he knows Joe is right about Bev but does nothing to stop it. Mildred, who refuses to participate in the madness after the Good Friday service was still more than willing not to question John returning to her, visiting every day for daily Mass, her inexplicable recovery from dementia and physical ailments. In the end, like Riley, the story wants the audience to find some redeeming qualities in the characters who last longer. We're meant to see Erin and Hassan and Warren and Annie and Leeza and Sarah as the plucky survivors, as somehow noble. Ed sacrifices himself so they can get away. Annie sacrifices herself to Bev and Sturge so the others can get away. But if you know you're going to be resurrected, is it really a sacrifice? Annie makes a comment when they're hiding in the house that they all claim to believe in Heaven, that it is a better place, and yet they all fight and claw for one more moment on earth. We're meant to see Erin and Hassan and Sarah as heroes for destroying the boats, acting too late, after having watched the town drink poison in the church. Erin dies, slitting holes in the wings of the angel, but not really enough to stop him from flying west thirty miles. Sturge shoots Hassan, and Ali betrays all Hassan wanted for him by first attending Mass regularly, then choosing God by drinking the poison. His later helping of his father is immaterial, it's window dressing, convenient, and changes nothing. Sturge shoots Sarah as she tries to burn the church. Father Paul gets what he wants in the end, his family, he and Mildred take Sarah to the bridge she liked as a child and die together.

Everyone dies in the end. No one learned their lesson. The angel flies off ahead of the sunrise to look for another sucker to start the cycle all over again. The series ends with Crockett Island on fire, a spectacular sunrise, all the inhabitants burned to a crisp and Warren and Leeza in a canoe that appears to be sinking, and which Warren said was not able to make it to the mainland, floating offshore as passive observers. Leeza loses her miracle at the end, claiming she can't feel her legs. But she also thought her parents could be saved and prays to God to protect them at the end, so she hasn't learned anything. It's easy to imagine her using her personal experience to evangelize others if she makes it. Warren is orphaned but no saint, and seems not to understand what happened really, so no learning there.

Midnight Mass reminds us that people are always willing to make a deal with the devil. It's not surprising in 2021 that no one learns a damn thing from their experiences, insist on denying the facts they saw with their own eyes, and doubles down on the same behaviors and beliefs that got them in the shit to begin with. Like Needful Things the townspeople abdicate all responsibility. They show no remorse for the horrific things they've done, how their children were affected, what they destroyed. Maybe their not capable, maybe the gift of the angel makes them incapable. But that seems like a convenient way to let people off the hook. Certainly Father Paul at the end seems to show that's a lie. It was not the angel's gift that made him not feel guilt, to feel what he describes as grace, it was his obsessive desires to claim he was doing God's work. He echoes Bev's condemnation, although he is sincere when he says it, that it was never supposed to be about him. He realizes that he unleashes an evil he couldn't control. Bev lets the them out of the Church, she refuses to take care of all the townspeople, she decides who gets grace, she decides to scorch the earth and bring about her vision of the Apocalypse. In the end Father Paul realizes that the only answer is to burn the church and walk away. But he does walk away. He says what is happening is wrong but he does not take any responsibility for it. Oops. Sorry you feel this way. Sorry this happened. Not "I am sorry that I deluded all of your for personal gain and because of it ruined every single thing I told you I valued." The Apocalypse happens whether or not anyone claims any responsibility, and it's not a big action at the end, like burning all the houses, it's the small, evil acts that people justify doing. It's poisoning a dog. It's putting Bibles in public schools. It's shaming a pregnant woman who left an abusive marriage. It's believing in the cult of personality of someone because they give you permission to act how you wanted all along.

It appears as though nothing ever changes. There's always a deal to be made because people never learn.