Read We Are Still Married for Free Online Page A

remorse is Number Last on the list around here. Cosmetics! That’s all City Hall wants and that’s what we give them. A few tears. You can twist arms, step on toes, or use raw onions, but forget about funding.”
    His insensitivity shocked me. Remorselessness is a fundamental flaw, a crack in the social contract, and repair requires a major commitment. One man simply couldn’t keep up with the caseload.
    I spent two months on the president of AmTox, who was sent to me after his conviction for dumping tons of deadly wastes into a scenic gorge and killing thousands of trout and who took a Who—me? attitude toward the deed until finally I elicited a small amount of shame by requiring him to spend Saturdays panhandling in the bus depot, wearing a sign that said “Help Me, I’m Not Too Bright.” But meanwhile hundreds of others got off scot-free. I’d put the screws to the guy who enjoyed touching pedestrians with his front fender, but meanwhile the guys who bilked hundreds of elderly women of their life savings walked out the door saying, “Hey, what’s the big deal? So we exaggerated a little. No need to get huffy about it.”
    It depressed the hell out of me. Here I was, swimming in paperwork with my hands tied, and out on the street were jerks on parade: unassuming, pleasant, perfectly normal people except that they had an extra bone in their head and less moral sense than God gave badgers. And the ones I did put through remorse didn’t improve a lot. Six months ago, thirty-seven former clients of mine filed a classaction suit against the state demanding millions in restitution for the ethically handicapped and arguing neglect on the state’s part in failing to provide remorse counseling earlier. “We have suffered terrible remorse,” the brief said, “as we begin to recognize the enormity of our sins, including but not limited to: pure selfishness, vicious cruelty, utter dishonesty, blind insensitivity, gross neglect, overweening pride, etc. And that’s fine. But where was this program ten years ago? Nowhere to be found! That was the Me Decade! Is that our fault? Therefore, in consideration of the vast black abyss of guilt to which we have been suddenly subjected, we demand that the court order ...” My heart sank as I read it. They had even quoted my speech to the Council on Penitential Reform in 1981:
    Criminal nonremorse is the tip of a very large iceberg, and unless we initiate broad-based remorse reforms on the community level and start talking about an overhaul of our entire moral system—church, media, education, the parental system, personal networking, the entire values-delivery infrastructure—and recognize that it requires major investment by private and public sectors in professional training and research and that we’re looking at a time frame of years, not months, and that we must begin now, we simply must, because, believe me, if we don’t, that is a mistake we’re going to live to regret!
    The state, they said further, had failed to exercise due care in neglecting to warn them earlier and to inform them of the urgent necessity of changing their ways.
    Three days later, the order came down that I was reassigned. By offering remorse assistance, it said, I had needlessly raised people’s expectations of inner peace.
    â€œThat means you, lamebrain,” Mitch cackled, leaning across his desk and poking an index finger into my rib cage. “Let’s see how you like it in the basement. ” He assigned me to “assist in the assembly and assessment” of ancient and dusty ascertainment files in a dim, airless room deep in the bowels of Human Services—useless and demeaning work that left me weak and dispirited after only a day, but I held on and did the work and didn’t complain. He plugged the ventilator, reduced light-bulb wattage, denied me a radio. I spent three weeks in that hellhole, reading