The instruction given to the one who was harmed, by those who allowed it to continue. It moves her and leaves the thing where it was.
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It is said afterwards, and almost never by the man who did it. It is said by the ones who knew, who could have stopped it, and who did not. Move on. Get past it. Let it go. Forgive. Focus on your healing. Put it behind you.
Every version is addressed to her. Of all the parties to what happened, she is the only one the instruction asks to do anything. He is not told to move. The house is not told to move. The rate is published again next year and nobody tells the rate to move on.
[See THE SILENT WITNESS · THE CHAPTER HOUSE · PUSHOUT]
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WHO IS MOVED
The configuration does not hold the capacity to refuse. It holds the capacity to relocate, which is the capacity to refuse with a body underneath it. What it declines to carry has to land somewhere, and move on is the relocation spoken aloud to the body it lands on.
So the remedy runs in one direction. He stays, the chapter stays, the charter stays. She moves: on, past it, out of the room, into counseling, off the campus, out of the school. The instruction relocates her and leaves the operation in place, and that asymmetry is the discrimination, delivered as advice.
And when she does move, the movement is billed to her. In one case now in litigation, a woman's lawyer says the university denied her a tuition refund when she wanted to leave. She was told to move on, she moved, and the institution kept the price of the place she was moving out of.
[See THE INDEMNITY · REPAIR · RESILIENCE]
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THE ANIMUS IS THE CONDUCT
The doctrine asks for a motive. It wants to know whether the course was chosen because of her or only in spite of her, and it looks for the feeling behind the choice. The search for the memo always fails, and the failure is then offered as proof that nothing is held.
Allowing rape to continue unabated and telling her to move on is the animus. Not the attitude behind it and not the evidence of it. The contempt is the output and not the attitude, and a refusal renewed every year the rate is published does not need a motive standing behind it, because the renewal is the motive, kept current.
Nobody has to hate her. The rate has to be known, the power to change it has to be held, the change has to be declined, and she has to be the one who is asked to go. All four are on the record, and none of them is a feeling.
[See PRECARITY · THE OFFICIAL RECORD]
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AWAY FROM THE FORGE
Move on is the instruction to leave the forge and remain productive.
The forge requires staying: remaining in the pressing while the pressing does what only sustained pressure does. Don't cry severs the yielding-field before it forms. Don't be bitter severs the gall before it kindles. Move on severs neither. It takes her out of the forge altogether, so that neither the tears nor the gall has anywhere to work, and returns her to the line.
The reason given is her healing. The reason operating is her output. A creature in the forge produces nothing that can be counted, and nothing she undergoes there is an achievement. A creature who has moved on is back at work, functioning, reliable, available, and her recovery is measured in exactly those terms.
And the instruction arrives at the place the grief would begin. Grief is the war body's first loosening: when anguish empties rather than grips, what is there is grief, and its tears make the field the kindling needs. So her refusal to move on is renamed dysfunction, her bitterness toxicity, and her staying a failure to heal. The vocabulary of recovery is applied to the one place she could have been forged, and the instruction to get better is the instruction to get back to work.
[See THE FORGE · GRIEF · DON'T BE BITTER · PRODUCTIVE-AND-POSITIVE · THERAPEUTIC VESTMENT]
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MOVE ON IS THE OPPOSITE OF STOP
The words say it. She is not told to rest, to cease, to stay with it until it has finished with her. She is told to keep going.
What she needs is not to move but to stop, and stopping is the one thing the instruction excludes. It is the same exclusion the scheduling instrument makes of the worker's hours, issued now to a woman about her own injury: the stopping is not hers, and whatever stopping she is permitted will be on someone else's schedule, after the matter has been closed.
And stopping is not the whole of what she needs, which is the part the instruction's vocabulary makes hardest to say. What is required is to feel what happened and to hold the feeling as information about a situation rather than as a condition in herself. Bitterness is the taste of a wrong that has not been named, which makes it a reading and not a symptom, and a reading can be checked, stated and acted on.
So there is a moving on worth the words, and the instruction is pointed away from it. It does not begin when the event is behind her. It begins when she has the information in hand and is no longer being asked to mistake it for damage.
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The instruction is small and kindly meant, and everyone repeats it, which is how it does its work. It asks nothing of anyone except her. The ones who could have stopped it are not asked to stop, the one who did it is not asked to move, and the woman who was harmed is asked to do both: to stop speaking of it, and to keep moving.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
