Joe Loya
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Was he behaving monstrously?
Yes.
But he wasn't a monster.
He was a little boy who had been beaten and beaten.
And he was like a tree that you keep beating.
It grows crooked.
More importantly, it was like a little unlicked cub grown to grizzly size.
He didn't get love.
He got violence.
What's he going to do?
He's going to grow up and be this angry bear.
And when I started looking at my dad's formation, I said, I don't need to forgive him.
I just accept that he is who he is because this is what happened to him.
And the biggest thing in me was I realized that we shared a grief that animated our violence as well.
he was totally in pain by the death of my mother.
It fractured him and it destroyed me too.
And so when I was able to look like, oh, our violence is underwritten in many ways by the death of my mother, the absence of my mother.
And then that made solidarity between us.
It's like, I found the hidden likeness.
Before it was just, oh, you're a monster and I was brutalized by you.