The Glass House Stone

I'm trying not to read anything or see anything or listen to anything with regard to the Penn State child molestation case. I figure any set of circumstances where the press is using "rape" as the least offensive semi-euphemism to avoid explaining in detail what is known to have happened, my psyche knows enough to pre-emptively recoil.

Suffice it to say I haven't stopped to read any of the graphic bits of viscera oozing out of the now notorious grand jury indictment. By inference (and I have a computer, a television and a radio, so it's a pretty heavy and ubiquitous drumbeat of inference inference inference inference...), I've puzzled together that at one point, one grown man stumbled onto the scene of another grown man assaulting a child in just about the most hideous manner possible and... left the scene quietly and went to tell his dad?

I'm a thinker. This isn't the same as being gifted or especially intelligent. I'd like to argue that I'm sometimes those things as well, but the blunt-force trauma of my physical beauty makes it too hard to convince people I'm something more than a buffet for the senses. Underneath this thicket of lustrous, dense, professionally tousled hair, a wild mind roams free. Like a panther, but made of synapses and propelled through the depths of trackless creativity and existential despair on the back of a snorting, untamed hippocampus. Some people should be carved in marble or immortalized in oil on canvas. I should be airbrushed onto the side of a panel van.

As a thinker, I often find myself involuntarily picking a fight with my initial impressions and/or conventional wisdom. So my first thoughts here after hearing about the non-intervening witness are of the conventional sort: staggering incredulity followed by rage and helplessness and despair. But then the thinking part rises up and I go: hang on. We're talking about what would likely be a pretty horrific physical intervention. And in situations like this, what have child molesters been known to do in order to avoid exposure? The stakes are really all or nothing for both the intervener and the victim should the would-be rescuer come out on the wrong end of a challenge.

And maybe it was just paralysis caused by the horrendous weight of the moment. A subordinate sees a universally respected superior engaged in something one hopes would have been until then genuinely unimaginable. It will be one word against another, where the Other has a half century of built relationships and support networks in place to, if not exonerate, then obfuscate and delay and redirect and, eventually, punish.

And maybe as the father of three boys, I've forgotten what the world looks like through the eyes of a non-parent. In every social situation, we make a calculation of how much of ourselves we are willing to wager. If our relationship is superficial and nonthreatening, we'll talk about weather or the route we took to get to the place we're now meeting; I push the smallest part of myself into the middle of the table with the understanding that I'm risking, at worst, some awkward silence or mutual disinterest. If I'm professionally ambitious, I push more of myself in, risking rejection and failure. If I'm in a romantic relationship and I want to win actual human intimacy, I push almost everything in, knowing I risk heartbreak and depression and long nights alone with my old Morrissey records should I lose.

I say "almost everything" in the last one because there is, I think, one more step where the interaction is inherently negative. In response to a threat to myself, someone I love or any analogue thereof, having been introduced to the true nature of the stakes by witnessing not just human births but those of my actual offspring, I can easily imagine a scenario in which I'm willing to truly risk everything, up to and including my own life, to defend a child suffering an assault of the type I've been very careful not to too closely describe for the sake of my own too-easy comfort.

But again, is this only because I'm father? I play the scenario over and over in my mind and 100 times out of 100, win or lose, I throw myself at the perpetrator and there is always, always blood. The only details that vary are Whose? and How much?

Maybe that's an evolutionary response package opened up on the day I successfully reproduced. I'm not a particularly brave man. I take alternate routes at work if I know I can avoid the awkwardness of deciding to smile/nod at a barely-known colleague. And I also get that we can only know when faced with the choice, like the Jeremy Davies character from the otherwise-mostly-terrible Saving Private Ryan, maybe we're less than we imagine.

I take all that into consideration, and then I think: nah. That guy was a pussy. I don't want to get too sidetracked because, you know, he didn't molest any kids. It's important to maintain our perspective. But seriously, fuck that guy.