Lift Up Your Hearts!

I enjoy most episodes of the TV show, NCIS, but one I watched recently left me more than usually disturbed.  To strip the show of all the redeeming and mitigating features, not to mention the whole rest of the complex episode, what happened was that a man used a hidden camera to videotape a couple of women in an undressed state, and put the videos online.  Wrong.  Immoral.  Creepy.  And it's true that one difference between now and BI (Before the Internet) is that such pictures never go away.  It's bad.  I don't deny it.  I don't want to think about how I might react if someone did that to one of our daughters or granddaughters—or grandsons, for that matter.

But still, I think the show is a good example of the overreaction I'm seeing all too often these days.  We've gone from ignoring and minimizing the problem of some forms of misbehavior to giving them unwonted significance.  As C. S. Lewis once said, in pondering the existence of devils, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them."  In the NCIS episode, the event causes one of the women to commit suicide and the other to exult in the murder of the man she believes to have ruined her life forever.  And our NCIS heroes reinforce the belief that the cameraman has done irreparable, irredeemable, unforgiveable damage.

What's wrong with this scenario?  When people have been violated, when terrible things have happened to them, it's good and right to acknowledge the wrongfulness of the action, to allow them to grieve as much as they need to, and to take action to prevent similar incidents.  But are we doing the victims any favors by encouraging them to believe they are ruined forever?  That they can never escape what has happened to them?  I'm going out on a dangerous limb here, because I've never had an offense that great to recover from—and my track record for forgiving much lesser offenses isn't all that good anyway.  But aren't we in danger of perpetuating the crimes, giving eternal power to the victimizers and plunging the victims into helplessness and hopelessness?  Condemning them to a life trying to avoid "triggers" the way someone with severe food allergies must live in fear of what that innocent-looking appetizer might have come in contact with?

I think we can do better.

The trigger for this post?  Just two days after the NCIS show, I read this Salon article by a former college professor.  ("I believed in trigger warnings when I taught a course on sex and film. Then they drove me out of the academy.")  WARNING:  The article is definitely not grandchild-safe.  The author was teaching about "the evolution of the representation of sex throughout American Cinema."  You'd think that alone would be warning enough that students would be seeing disturbing images and discussing topics that would make them uncomfortable.  I should imagine that anyone signing up for such a class would know what he was getting into.  "My classes were about race, gender, and sexuality. These are inherently uncomfortable topics that force students to think critically about their privilege and their place in the hierarchy of this world."

You couldn't pay me enough to take such a course. I have full sympathy with the students who complained about some of the scenes they were expected to watch.  What astounds me is the students' (often conflicting) demands to control the content of the class.  I didn't take many liberal arts classes in college, so I can't say for sure that it didn't happen then, but I'm almost certain the professors would have responded, "You aren't strong enough to handle my class?  Then don't take it."  I can only hope this nonsense hasn't infected the physical sciences.  (Professor, your statement that 7t x 2 = 14t reminds me of my fourth grade teacher, who used to swat my hand for not knowing the times tables.  You need to warn me when you are going to use arithmetic, so I can skip class.  And you can't penalize me for not knowing what you taught in my absence.)

A couple of weeks later, graduate students at the University of Kansas demanded that a professor be fired, because they were offended when she uttered the word, "nigger," even in the almost-abjectly humble context that it was hard for her to know how to talk about race relations because, being white, she had not experienced racism herself.  "It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray painted on walls…”  One complaining student wrote, "I was incredibly shocked that the word was spoken, regardless of the context. ... I turned to the classmate sitting next to me and asked if this was really happening.  Before I left the classroom, I was in tears."

She was in tears.  She was unbelievably shocked at the mere utterance of a word, in a context of support and attempted understanding.  On a college campus where I guarantee other offensive words are flung around frequently, casually, and often with intent to offend.  And she is a graduate student, not a second grader.  How can one get to the graduate school level and still be so fragile?

Life is hard.  For people who have had to deal all their lives with discrimination and racism, with poverty, abuse, illness, handicaps, or other challenges, life is much harder.  By what kind of cruel, twisted logic does society encourage someone facing such difficulties to think of herself as weak? 

This letter to the Free-Range Kids blog shows a more helpful attitude.  (It's probably also not grandchild-safe, depending on the grandchild.)  As a child, the man was repeatedly, sexually groped by his barber, and only much later realized what had been going on.  In the letter he takes pains not to justify the barber's actions, but neither will he dignify them by assuming they ruined his life.  "Try as I may, I cannot summon outrage at the pathetic man who assaulted me. Nor can I conclude that I am any worse for the wear. ... I enjoy a normal life including a healthy-though-unremarkable sex life."

Things happen to us.  Good things.  Bad things.  Sometimes horrible things.  They are all part of the material that makes us who we are, and I'm convinced that how we handle them is more important than the events themselves.  What can we do to empower those who have been through terrible times to be overcomers rather than perpetual victims?