We
live in interesting times. We live in alarming times.
Ignorance,
partisan politics, climate change. Racism, anti-vaxxers, MAGA.
The
election of an American President the whole planet would be embarrassed if
aliens ever found out about. Yellow vests. Pipeline convoys. There’s so much to
oppose and there’s opposition to the opposition, but some of the intended good
creates bad. It’s all so muddy.
The #METOO
movement and Black Lives Matter have been important grassroots attacks on a
status quo too complacent with that which is harmful. But they haven’t happened
without their own complications, their own questions. Please excuse the racial irony
here: but the world just ain’t that black and white.
And sex? Oh, my
oh my. I lament the fall of Kevin Spacey even if it does sound if his sexually exploitive
misadventures (is that PC enough?—I can’t even keep up anymore) are more than
just a single incidence, more than just one person’s accusation, and more than
just something that happened thirty years ago. Harvey Weinstein appears to be a
career scumbag who deserves every bit of punishment that’s coming. Bill Cosby
went from America’s Dad to, yeah, pretty damn unsettling. It’s good these cases
are coming to light, even if a single mis-step from a very long time ago leads
to a downfall. Celebrity shouldn’t be protection. If you learn nothing else
from this, it’s that partiality to a celebrity can only lead to disappointment.
I mean, Bill Cosby. He created the Fat
Albert show.
Some remain
questionable and make you think about how quick we are to judge someone, to
convict them in the court of public opinion. I’m left wondering if we’re
sometimes too quick to judge and worse, what our judgements say about our views
of retribution.
The most recent
witch hunt targets Liam Neeson, who admitted in a weirdly off-hand way that he
once (forty years ago) wanted to commit violence against a random black man—even
seeking one to attack—after a friend of his was raped by a black man.
In the outcry
that I heard raised those two key components—that he was reacting to a friend’s
assault and that it happened during the Ford Administration—are never
addressed. It’s treated as plain and simple racism and current events. That’s
not exactly what’s going on here. The man admitted fault in his thoughts and
almost in his actions, he was expressing the wrongness of this and attributing
it youth and rage at what happened to a friend. That’s not an excuse, mind—that’s
added facts. Facts are really easy to avoid when they’re inconvenient to your
opinion.
The man is
simply attacked with the context completely ignored and somehow his story is
woven into the modern rhetoric of racism. That’s stupid. Thoughts like this are
wrong—as Neeson in his 60s recognizes—but this cannot be reflective of now. These events are as topical as the
Cold War. This is not an unpunished crime (like Cosby and Spacey), this is a fit
of passion in a young man being judged by himself forty years later as wrong.
This is the growth of a human.
No, that doesn’t
mean I’m saying it’s okay. It means I’m saying that if we who oppose racism
light our torches anytime anyone admits to past wrongdoing we’re going to a) be
just as stupid as the folks who prop up Trump and Kenney or let their kids get
polio because they read a website and b) we’re going to run out of humans real
quick because even Jesus a completely wise kid. That’s why it’s called growing up.
At what point do
the facts become to hazy or dated to be valid? If it involves sex or racism it’s
never not valid, maybe, but then when
a person is completely written off before the system we have to supposedly find
truth and rehabilitate the guilty can do it’s job, we’re in mob territory. We
have democracy for a reason. Even if Facebook is undermining it. (Note to self:
compose a blog how social media is turning us back in to barbarians.)
So many of
these allegations were from thirty or forty years ago. Spacey’s was just the
one but so many followed it became nearly impossible to contest it. Cosby was
actually convicted in a court, and
again, the sheer number of accusers made even the court of public opinion fairly
credible in its assessment. But in cases like Neeson’s we’re saying that a
single impulse (without action) admitted to in the frame of the perpetrator’s
own very dated and hazy recollection, we’re now outside the realm of logic.
I once had a
conversation with someone who said that if only one allegation against someone
is true, then the witch hunt is worth it, and every opinion is valid. Maybe not
wrong, but tough talk.
It’s not a new
pattern. People have been accused of “sexual interference” before and have for
ages, maybe just not in the new politically correct buzz term nonsense speak.
The media has taken it and run with it. Lesser journalists are quick to condemn
the accused or even add a creative twist or bias to the attacks.
Been around
before but it’s certainly stronger now. And rightly so. That #BLACKLIVESMATTER
and #METOO have taken by wedging themselves so deeply into our collective
consciousness shows we can change a society. Change is happening where it should
have long ago but with change should come rationale thought. Otherwise things
are just bad in a new way.
We exist in a
world where innocence until guilt is proven is how we are supposed to function.
Confession to mistakes in youth should equal applause for growth as a person
(assuming an unconvicted crime isn’t lingering there somewhere). When we start
convicting people for unacted thoughts we’ve gone Orwell.
