Sideline Judges

Sooner or Later - N.E.R.D. (mp3)
Truth Be Told - Chris Cubeta (mp3)

“Please don’t. Please please please.”
My ear was flush against the wooden door, and I couldn't move, almost as if it had been glued there...
_________

Nothing is easier than judging from the sideline. When you have no skin in the game, when you have no actual responsibilities, when you can create a fictional, hypothetical and heroic version of yourself, insert them into your own imagined version of real events, and play out every detail however you like, it’s easy to judge real people in their real moments.

He should’ve done that differently. How dare she allow that to happen. How can they go on with their daily lives and ignore that. And so on.

The story is long stale, I guess, but I’m still haunted by Penn State, by an alleged child molester, by the chain reaction of choices and reportage that fell short of sufficient, and by the flood of opinions from all over the country about how easy and simple all of this would have been if only they had been in the center of the hurricane rather than these power-hungry jock egotists at Penn State.

Having been a teenage victim myself, how could I let this story quickly die? I have great hope that this story is the beginning of a national wake-up call, that we might finally be at a place, as an entire society, where talking openly about male-on-male sexual abuse is pulled into the light.

I’ve had these conversations. With real people. It’s easier to talk about, to write about, to debate and discuss Two Girls & A Cup than it is to talk about being molested by an older man.

Think about that, please: adults are more comfortable talking openly about having watched a video where two women make out by orally swapping one another’s fecal matter while naked than they are about boys being raped or molested by other men.

The sooner we can talk about it, collectively, with greater comfort than we talk about decapitation or the N-Word, the sooner we'll reduce the number of victims and minimize the recidivism of predators.
_________

Another reason this story moves me is because I’ve also been the coward.

My first semester in college, I was in my dorm the final night of exams. Because I had to bum a ride from someone else headed back to Tennessee, I was there on a night when at least 90% of campus had gone home, and what remained was a random skeleton crew of students and adults. Four of us from my dorm ended up playing some drinking game and getting shitfaced in one girl’s room, and then I walked the girl I liked -- don’t worry, she was just a friend -- back to her room. On the way back down to my own room, some 20 minutes later, I walked past the room where we’d been playing and drinking, so I was going to poke my head in and say goodnight, but the door was locked.

I knocked. Nothing. I put my ear to the door and heard low mumbling.

The two were making out, and they clearly hadn’t even heard me knock. As I began to walk away, I heard her say something about how they had to stop, how it she couldn’t do this. (She had been dating one guy since she’d been a sophomore in high school, and we all knew it.)

I walked back inside the suite and put my ear against the door. You’d be amazed how thin those doors were. Her voice was scared, yet it also sounded like they were still making out, like she was OK with kissing him, but just not OK that he wanted more.

I felt like such a voyeur. Would they think I had been out here the whole time? Had anything really wrong happened yet? How long could I wait until it was really a serious problem? OhGodOhGodOhGod whatamIsupposedtodo???

It was a cowardly moment for me. No way around it. My "I've been molested" defense felt thin and still does. All my comic book worship and superhero study couldn’t excuse me from sitting out there in the hallway, frozen and horrified. To this day, I still refuse to believe my inaction was a crime. Cowardly, pathetic, perhaps even inexcusable. But criminal?

I can tell you things worked out. I can tell you they stopped, and he didn't rape her. I can tell you I had two future events in college that allowed me to make things right, karmically, to prove I'd learned my lesson. I can tell you lots of stuff, but in that moment, I was frozen, and useless, and utterly uncertain about everything. Most days, I think that feeling of fearful pathetic paralysis was even worse than being the victim. It's certainly haunted me more over time.
_________

To Mike McQueary: I’m sorry fate put you in that spot. I’m sorry you didn’t act, but I won’t judge you. I believe you sincerely tried to do the right thing, even if we can all look back and proclaim it “wasn’t enough.”

To everyone who thinks this is about football or power, I think you haven’t been paying attention. This is about a culture afraid to acknowledge predators, afraid of stirring up uncomfortable situations. It’s about a 28-year-old at the bottom of the totem pole in a country where, I’m sorry, the police would probably have done nothing once he reported it.

Let’s pretend he reports it. You think it’s some magic open-and-shut case, where the police arrest the former assistant coach, the leader of a popular non-profit group, where they lock his ass away forever based on one witness and a simple trial? I hope you’re all that naive as you pass judgment.

He could have reported it. The police could have investigated and arrested. They could have chosen not to press charges. McQueary could have lost his job for not going through the proper channels before making such a dangerous accusation. He would have been unhirable. The charges could have been dropped, and Sandusky could be right where he is at this very moment, just now facing justice for the same increasing and disgusting illness.

But it’s easier to not think. It’s easier to keep things simple, to throw that stone, to use words like “enabling” and “cowardly.”

It’s easier to tell ourselves, as we go to sleep as night, that we’re better people.

Sleep tight, better people. One day, your test will arrive, and I hope you have your Number Two pencil ready.

Me? I pray every night God is grading on one seriously generous curve.

Aftermath

Hardliners - Holcombe Waller (mp3)

Let's imagine you and your family just crawled out of your nuclear shelter, having hunkered down in that space since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That's about the only way you could live in America and not know the name Joe Paterno.


What unfolded at Penn State University this past week -- over the past decade, actually -- has created a level of debate and discussion that football fanatics, detractors, or apathetic sideliners can jump in with both feet. The drama involves the destroyed innocence of children, the abuse of power, a well-known sports figure, and the world ending because of a whimper rather than a bang.

The perceived male mentor turned predator of boys -- unspeakable.

The downward-trending descriptions as the event went up the chain of command, from "rape" to "inappropriate contact" to "horseplay" -- uncanny.

The image of thousands of intelligent college students in a mild riot not because of children being victimized, but because of hero worship -- unthinkable.

But what's worth remembering this morning is that, alongside this quiet and slow-developing horror story is a another old as Whoville and the Grinch: the tale of what happens to a community when bad shit lands on the doorstep.

On Saturday, roughly 107,000 people -- a record crowd -- crammed into Beaver Stadium and locked arms. Every player, coach and staffer from both Penn State and Nebraska huddled in the middle of the field to pray. The level and potency of the collective grief was stunning to view, even from a living room in Tennessee.

The cynic could complain that everything was too carefully choreographed, that the entire scene was arranged by propagandists and marketing teams hired to improve a rock bottom opinion of all things Nittany Lion while also warming the confused and hurting hearts of its students, fans and alumni.

Maybe so. Maybe most modern pop music and everything my children encounter on TeenDisney or TeenNick is scientifically crafted by entire groups of songwriters to elicit specific emotional responses. But sometimes an event deserves and requires us to move a step beyond our cynicism.

Watching people of all ages mourning a flood of different issues was powerful regardless of whether the scenario was manufactured. The end of an era, the loss of innocence, the confusion and frustration that a string of events with only one clearcut no good terribly awful person could bring down a legend and possibly a program. But at least everyone in that stadium were in the same place, feeling the same things, in a communal way.

From national events like September 11 to local events like the tragic death of a student. Aftermath is a powerful, magnetic force. That it pulls us together doesn't make it a good thing, but in dark times, we reach and hunger for the tiniest bits of light we can muster.

For all the heavy judgment and debates going on like a hurricane around and inside the Penn State campus, and when the light is hard to come by, at least huddling together in the darkness provides some warmth.

Everyone deserves a little of that.

It Happens.

Pillar of Davidson - Live (mp3)
Message In a Bottle (cover) - 30 Seconds to Mars (mp3)

The rough estimate is something like this: One in every six men were sexually abused as children.

For some, the abuse is an ongoing endless nightmare from a trusted mentor, loved one, relative. For others, it is a lightning flash nightmare that happens so briefly in the history of their lives that it’s almost easier to convince yourself it never happened.

The subject has become slightly less verboten of late.

The scandal of the Catholic church started to open this door. Lately, a handful of celebrities have emerged to admit their own history of victimization. Sugar Ray Leonard, Tyler Perry, CNN anchor Don Lemon -- all African-American, but more of a coincidence than anything of statistical relevance -- have all come out recently to share their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of another older man.

Tyler Perry joined 199 other men who stood together on an episode of Oprah last fall in the hopes of making it clear that the problem is all too frequent and too easily swept under rugs.

I don’t remember how old I was when I finally told my mother I’d been sexually abused. Maybe 28. Maybe 30. I think I’d already become a father. We were in a hospital cafeteria, I think waiting for my father in ICU. But I couldn’t tell you the year or the season.

What I do recall was the feeling in my body. That this horrible volcano of truth was about to come out of me and rock her world in ways that would be altogether different from the way it rocked my own.

I’d told probably a dozen people by that point, including my wife only a few months into our relationship, but telling my mom was the toughest of all, and there wasn’t a close second.

The experience of being sexually abused is not a story anyone is excited to tell to anyone -- much less a parent who had no way of knowing, no way of preventing, no way of protecting. It’s a story that was bound to leave my mother conflicted with haunting thoughts of her own and, therefore, a story that for the longest time I thought best never to share.

I was hardly a defenseless toddler when it happened. I was 16. But in matters of sex and intimacy, I might as well have been 9, because I was completely inexperienced and naive beyond belief.

It happened at a summer church camp where I was a first-time counselor. I was as much an odd bird then as now, but far less comfortable in my skin. The other counselors, some of whom were classmates of mine, all came from two other churches in town. They were mostly the cool and attractive kids, and I was just me, desperate to fit in, over-eager to please, eager to be some flashlight device shining The Light of Jesus on kids.

Translation: I was easy pickins.

The most charismatic man at camp took me under his wing. His name was David, and everyone thought he was this amazing mixture of cool and warm. He carried himself with such ease and grace, yet he also was able to make you feel like he genuinely cared about every person who crossed his path. The first few times we spoke, it was daylight. They were Jesus talks. About my faith and my life. And we’d be walking down a sidewalk, passing all these kids, and all of them treated David like a rock star.

Then one night he asked me to walk the grounds with him after lights out, when the counselors were a little more free, and we talked more. I felt special that he’d singled me out for this honor. I remember him sitting on a stairwell. It was on the outside of a building, but covered and lighted, and I stood leaning back with my arm extended and hand on the rail, swaying back and forth while we talked about the miseries of teenage-dom.

I remember him concluding our talk by hugging me. I remember thinking of that hug over the years, realizing that I had, with the allowance of a simple hug, invited him like some vampire into some other realm of my existence.

All the counselors slept in a single room, on sleeping bags on the floor. And this is the part that is the most surreal. We got back from that walk, and everyone was asleep, and I went to my sleeping bag. I was on the verge of sleep when he crawled next to me. Was it an hour? Twenty minutes? Half the night? I have no idea. I only know we were in a very dark room with perhaps eight, 10 other teenagers sleeping all around me.

Did any of them wake up? Did they just not say anything? Why didn’t I scream? Why didn’t I fight? Did it go on all night, or just a few hours? How many Bible verses could I recite from memory, over and over, in the hopes of pretending I was somewhere else, pretending this wasn’t happening?

The next morning was a fog, as were the mornings after that. The rest of camp became two sharply-divided stories. The first story was daylight, a time when I zombie-walked past people, trying to figure out what was happening while not giving away my fears, my experiences, my attempts to somehow connect all of it to my faith. In the daylight, there were several days when I truly thought it might not have happened, that it might actually be some weird recurring dream. And I was freaked out by how easily I could separate what was happening to me from the daily act of living.

Every day, this man would stand up in front of hundreds of children and talk about the love of Jesus, and his words held sway. He was, I truly believed, girding the faith of a lot of kids, possibly even getting them to rededicating themselves to their faith. Surely he wasn’t doing these things to me. Surely it was a dream.

Night, however, was a time of paralytic fear, where I felt almost like a prisoner incapable of realizing the only bars and restraints were ones I permitted, were ones in my own innocent and frightened mind. I’m pretty sure it happened four nights. Maybe three. Maybe five.

The fact that I can’t remember details is, oddly, what makes me all the more accepting of the reality. If I remembered everything, I’d somehow worry that I’d crafted the entire tale.

The story has an oddly almost-happy ending.

The last day of camp, as everyone was packing and preparing to return home, David dragged me away to a place I suspect he had scouted and picked for just this moment. David asked if he could drive me home, and we could stay here and help clean up the camp before heading back. It was clear what he was asking, and I remember my entire body almost convulsing with fear.

Although I had allowed it to go on for several nights, somehow in this instant I found the courage to say no, to push him away, to find some deep and intense resolution to stand ground. Had David gotten truly violent, I would not have succeeded in walking away that day, but he didn’t, because he was ultimately a coward. And I managed to get this sense that I'd ended the experience with some miniscule sense of control and power.

I’m not writing this pushing for a book deal, nor am I writing it to create in my friends or acquaintances who read BOTG a sense of awkwardness or guilt. Most of the folks who read this and know me have known me long enough now to, I think, get beyond that kind of reaction, at least eventually.

I’m writing this because a lot of semi-famous and brave people have recently added their names to the long list of men who were, at some point in their lives, taken advantage of. I’m writing this because surely for every man who carries these experiences with him into adulthood, at least two women can match him.

In college, I told four female friends about my abuse, and three of the four had been raped or molested, and they told me their stories in return, and I remember feeling so humbled by their experience.

A hundred million bottles, lost upon the shore...
A hundred million castaways, looking for a home...

I just finished the disturbing book ROOM this week. At one point in the book (SPOILER ALERT) the abducted woman at the book’s center is being interviewed on national television, and she says: “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible.”

This was precisely the feeling (except my experience was by comparison a drop in the wasabi bucket). You don’t want people thinking you feel special or unique in your suffering. You don’t want sympathy when a tsunami can wipe out entire areas of Japan.

Over the years, I’ve tried providing my information to key people in the hopes this man could be tracked down. I’ve never worried about wanting punishment for his crimes against me, but I occasionally still worry about others he might have abused because I didn’t step up and report or accuse. My Google searches and my reports to several web sites and my sharing information with several people in law enforcement led almost nowhere. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad.

Oh yeah, and David was black. Which added, you know, a whole ‘nother layer of confusion and challenge to the experience.

Anyway, I can’t stop him. He could be arrested or dead by now for all I know, or he could still be working in a religious setting with children, still seeking out the vulnerable and lost sheep.

But at least I can write out some of the basics. At least I can add my name to the long and disturbing list of men who carry this with them. At least I can, hopefully, serve as an example to others who go through it that you can lead a fairly normal adult life, that it’s possible to heal and recover and carry on.

Sure, you have moments when it’s there. Certain things trigger the experience in one way or another. For example, everytime I hear “Pillar of Davidson,” for some reason I think back on it, even though the song wasn’t out until I was in college.

Funny how you can spend two months trying to write this, and you can take 1,700 words, and you still can’t get it organized, you still can’t get it all to come together. Maybe because all of that would be a great excuse to continue delaying the act of getting it out there.

So I’m not delaying anymore.

I was sexually molested as a teenager. I survived. The experience and the memory is as messy and disorganized as this attempt at explaining it.

But it happened. And it happens every day to boys all over this country, all over the world. And we really ought to start figuring out a way to make it less shameful for the victims to come out and admit it, even if I don’t have the first clue where to start on doing that.

The Sins of the Son

Strange Days - Matthew Good Band (mp3)

EXHIBIT A:
The Philadelphia Enquirer recently wrote a powerful 7-part series about violence and schools called “Assault on Learning.” Part Five was titled “Young and Violent, Even Kindergarteners.” Here’s the introduction:

Tabitha Allen blames herself for her 10-year-old son's violent behavior.

Growing up and living in a drug-infested, hooker-inhabited neighborhood, the 33-year-old mother of five is angry about life.

"My anger reflects off my children," Allen explained one morning in the North Philadelphia rowhouse she inherited from her grandmother. Her son - a thin, almost gaunt, boy with long eyelashes - punched a teacher last June at Kenderton Elementary School, a K-8 in Tioga. He knocked the glasses off her face and blackened her eye with a blow that packed unexpected power.

As a 10-year-old, he had reached the minimum age to be arrested, and ended up with a simple assault charge in Family Court, where he was put on probation. He was removed from Kenderton and transferred to a classroom for disruptive elementary school students in Logan.

EXHIBIT B:
Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, Jesse Mathews shot and killed -- shot in the head at close range -- a police officer who had the unmitigated gall to attempt to taze Jesse after a foiled armed robbery attempt. Jesse emerged yesterday from a medically-induced coma. We revived him just so we can spend millions of dollars to kill him later.

In the meantime, Mathews was a parole jumper from Colorado with a nice string of recent robberies under his belt. The FBI has since arrested both of his parents, his sister, and his sister’s boyfriend, all of whom helped Jesse procure weapons and harbored him and paid to keep him away from the arm of the law.

Go read that story. It’s quite the Addams Family they have going, these Mathews people.

EXHIBIT C:
All over this great country of ours, teachers are having to fight for every ounce of respect they can get. Unions are being busted, pay ain’t increasing, benefits are being cut, and experts and politicians are demanding “accountability” for those who earn money through educating kids.

“Fixing” teachers is the cornerstone of fixing the problem of education in this country, they say.

CONCLUSION:
I dare you, absolutely dare you, to go read that Philadelphia Enquirer series and that Chattanoogan.com article and have the unmitigated gall to continue insisting that teachers are the cornerstone of a child’s education. You don’t have to be a Tiger Mother to know that parents -- often a Single Mother -- is the single biggest obstacle to improving education across this country.

Parenting, when done right, is one of the hardest, most agonizing, most stressful professions in the world. But it ain’t rocket science. It requires time and devotion, but it doesn’t require a doctorate or scads of intelligence. Just commitment and conviction.

When I look around at these stories in the news about kids and young adults wrapped up in criminal activity, what I see are stories about kids with sh*tty, neglectful, abusive parents.

And usually it’s just one parent, because the man usually drops his seed, earns some kid with his name, and then disappears into the ether of some other woman’s bedroom to repeat the process a few more times. The man is sh*tty, neglectful and abusive by disappearing and taking no responsibility. The woman is left alone to clean up, except she’s often too young, too stupid, or too overwhelmed to do it, and the consequence is that she often becomes sh*tty, neglectful and abusive.

You want to fix education? Go after sh*tty parents with every ounce and every dollar of reform you can. You want to reform prison? Punish parents for the criminal transgressions of their children.

Am I being Draconian and unsympathetic? Hell no. Not to the kids I’m not. Not to the young adults who are raised in households like Jesse Mathews must have been, with parents who kill people in botched robberies, who buy their felon relatives guns and bullet-proof vests, who make a living by dodging the law as one big happy family.

You want to prevent Jesse Mathews? Prevent his parents. Prevent them, or if you can’t prevent them, bring an unholy hammer of Thor down on their f**king skulls when their child proves them incompetent.

Let me get this right. A 25-year-old could go into a bar, drink 20 shots, drive into a family on the highway, and that bar can be held responsible in part for the tragedy, but a 25-year-old f**knut raised in an incompetent or abusive household shoots a family, and the parents aren’t the least bit at fault?? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Blame a bar for 30 minutes of neglect, but hold parents blameless for 20 years of neglect.

Are there good and committed parents whose children fall and stray and end up criminals despite their best intents? Abso-friggin’-lutely. But these theoretical parents are vastly, VASTLY, less significant in their percentages than committed and good teachers whose students can’t pass a state-issued bubble sheet, and we sure don’t seem hesitant to want to bring down the hammer on those people, much less pay them anything for their troubles.

You want justice? You want fairness? You want a better future? It’s time we started talking about enforcing a new level of justice and scrutiny on parents. Too many have gotten away with too little for too long.

A Child's Fault

Suzanne Vega--"Luka (live)" (mp3)
Ron Sexsmith--"Reason To Believe" (mp3)

Inspired by the recent trial and the tragic circumstances of one of our students.

It is not a child’s fault that no one else saw.

It is not a child’s fault that no one asked.

It is not a child’s fault that when warned not to tell because bad things would happen, he believed it.

It is not a child’s fault that she didn’t tell.

It is not a child’s fault that he was afraid.

It is not a child’s fault that she was found out.

It is not a child’s fault that his body contained evidence.

It is not a child’s fault that she said a name.

It is not a child’s fault that the police were not properly trained to question him.

It is not a child’s fault that a parent asked too many times, over and over, exactly what had happened to her.

It is not a child’s fault that he acted out sexually as a result.

It is not a child’s fault that a lawyer didn’t know how to properly present her as a witness.

It is not a child’s fault that he didn’t remember at age 8 everything that had happened to him at age 6.

It is not a child’s fault if she remembered it sometimes differently, sometimes incompletely, sometimes completely.

It is not a child’s fault if he forgot, or if he tried to forget.

It is not a child’s fault if she was coached, like every witness who has taken the witness stand has been coached.

It is not a child’s fault if he wonders why he was not believed.

It is not a child’s fault if she no longer trusts how the world works.

Eventually, it will be passed off as something that happened to them way back in childhood, and they will be expected to get beyond it, and everything that happens later on will indeed be seen as their fault.