Lately, I find myself frequently having reason to tell my kids that if you eat a steady diet of garbage, then only garbage can come back out of you. My boys change visibly if I separate them from YouTube for even a couple of weeks. Taking away my middle son's "private" screens so that the only things he can watch are things I can also fully see and hear has almost magically brought my beautiful boy's shining light back out of him from the deep well that it got lost in over the last few years. It is telling.
Then I wonder...
I wonder what my diet is on a daily basis. I'm at home with a toddler, which really should be the most wholesome company there is. But you see, as an adult who literally speaks to almost no other adult for a week at a time besides my husband, I sometimes feel like everything inside of me that can think, create, and innovate is dying until all I'm capable of is repetitive orders regarding not licking shoes and the folding of laundry while uttering subaudible swear words.
So, what do I do? Do I make phone calls to other adults? No, I don't, because I know I will be tempted to vomit all my strange, oxymoronically stagnant inner turmoil all over that person and I abhor the thought.
Do I join some social group to read books or learn to crochet or play card games? No. Honestly, who has time when there's all that laundry to fold and swearing to practice?
Do I just force myself to think by writing or even reading something that is challenging or working with my hands or teaching myself trigonometry? No. Because all of the above activities are very frustrating when they get interrupted every 13.23 minutes by a toddler.
So what do I choose when I feel like my brain is in a state of advanced atrophy from lack of adult interaction? I choose to fool myself into believing that I have what I need by going on Facebook. I've joined a couple of the most positive groups I can find there. One is for posting jokes without political, vulgar, or derogatory content. One is about positive thinking, kindness, and spiritual contemplation. But even with all that, Facebook is pretty much the definition of a diet of garbage. Even if you want to avoid it, you still can't escape the worst our society has to offer on Facebook.
The latest is this: a group of high school students who happened to be mostly white, all male, and Catholic, went to the March for Life in Washington. At the end of the day, outside of the Lincoln Memorial, they became embroiled in a nonviolent conflict with two other groups. One was the Black Hebrew Israelites, who were there for their own protest or march. The other was a group of First Nations marchers.
Anyone who has been on the internet has probably already read more about this than they really needed to over the last few days. There is an absurd amount of blame, condemnation, and even threat flying about.
The basic details seem to be that 1) The boys were wearing MAGA hats.
2) The boys may have yelled something at some young women at some point in the afternoon. I haven't gone in search of video to confirm or deny this myself because I just cannot force feed myself any more of this particular garbage.
3)While waiting for their buses at the Memorial, the boys found themselves the target of some fairly egregious insults being hurled by the adult members of the Black Hebrew Israelites group.
4) The boys decided to chant school cheers and songs, some of which seem to have contained hand gestures that were capable of causing offense, to drown out the insults.
5) An elder of the Indigenous People's March decided (it seems pretty clear at this point) to approach the high school boys and play his drum in what he describes as prayer.
6) The boys laughed, smiled, clapped, and maybe even smirked. The didn't give way to those who approached them but they also didn't escalate any violence.
7) A heavily edited video was released claiming the boys had surrounded the elderly Vietnam-era veteran Omaha Tribe elder and harassed him.
8) Cue absurd national outrage, threats, condemnation of parents, calls for firings of people, etc. and absurd knee-jerk return reaction defending everything the boys did and condemning all the other groups... Ugh. Excuse me while I go get just a little bit sick.
So why do I bother even weighing in on this if I think it is part of a diet of garbage I should not be eating? Because in all this madness, I think everyone has forgotten quite a few things:
1) Just because one person in an argument is wrong doesn't mean the other person can't also be wrong. In other words, two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes. Do I think the Catholic school boys did everything right or even did everything in line with Christian teachings? No. It is extremely hard to be totally silent in the face of vulgar, egregious insult, but that is exactly what we're called upon to do when we're told to "turn the other cheek." The boys didn't need to cheer, sing, or shout down their taunters and they could have turned and walked away from Mr. Phillips and his prayer drum. They could have circled up and prayed. They could have left their MAGA hats at home.
I don't personally think MAGA hats mean what those who want to put the worst construction on everything try to make them mean. I don't believe that people who wholeheartedly embraced the slogan, "Make America Great Again" actually meant "Make America White, Male, and Christian Again." I think the vast, pervasive, HUGE majority of the MAGA crowd actually just wanted America to be economically, legally, and nationally strong, which includes justice being demographically blind and Constitutionally based.
That being said, I do think that anyone who has half a clue knows that wearing MAGA hats makes a statement in our current sociopolitical climate, and that statement may very well just be a poke to the proverbial bear. The Bible admonishes us to "Go West, young man, when the evil go East." Does anyone really think that means parading a politically inflammatory symbol in front of the opposing side?
So I'm willing to admit the high school boys didn't make good, Christian choices from moment one, and that some of the defense of them seems pretty sycophantic. But just because they were wrong doesn't mean the other side of the argument can't be wrong too.
It seems pretty clear that two large groups of ADULTS who should seriously be more mature than a bunch of high school boys chose to egregiously taunt and then publicly smear those boys. When challenged, the elder called the actions of the boys "beastly" but justified the insults flung AT the boys as, "harsh things, but some of it was true." Really? What was true about those boys being called "f****ts, incest babies, future school shooters, and (of the one African American Covington Catholic student) n****rs/c**ns?" And why did the adult flingers of such sickening insults need to be protected from boys wearing offensive hats by a group of, again, adults who proceeded to tell the boys that they should "Go back to Europe, invaders."
It seems to me like just about everyone involved was wrong.
2) Just because everyone was wrong doesn't mean anyone deserves to have their lives ruined. When my teenage son gets into trouble at school in a situation where there was a lot of emotional pressure and a short opportunity for strategic thought, I don't remove him from school, defame him in public, send terrible character references about him to all his possible future schools and employers, and threaten his life. I also don't defend his choices at all costs of sophistry. I talk to him about what he could have done differently and why.
I remind him that he represents not only himself, but his family, his history, and his faith in all his actions in his public life. If he did anything well, I tell him that too. And then I give him another chance. And another. And another. Because he is a kid and I am an adult and because Jesus himself said to forgive each other seventy times seven times. Which means, by the way, NOT four-hundred ninety times exactly, but rather keep forgiving until you've forgotten the count of how many times you've forgiven.
These schoolboys could have done better. They could have done worse. Can we all just act like adults and teach them instead of acting like a mad zombie hoard intent upon eating their very souls for their mistakes? Can we acknowledge that they did not, in fact, scream epithets or taunts back at those who taunted them? Can we acknowledge that they didn't escalate to physical violence?
Can we acknowledge that two separate groups of actual adults acted every bit as badly as or worse than a group of teenagers? Can we acknowledge that everyone involved in this needs a lesson in manners? And yet everyone involved in this did nothing that they didn't have a right to do under the Consitution. We all have the right to stand, silent and still, in the face of confrontation--even if we do it with an undecipherable smile/smirk on our faces--even if we appear disrespectful to our elders. (In another context, that very action would be painted as heroic civil disobedience.) We all have the right to say whatever words we choose to say that aren't a direct call to violence, even if those words are offensive to somebody, somewhere, or even if they're vile epithets. Free speech includes speech that makes you look like a total jerk. Free speech includes MAGA hats and prayer chant drumming and disgusting name calling. Sorry.
Just so we're clear, you may be protected from the government throwing you into a gulag by the Constitutional right to free speech but you aren't protected from criticism by others exercising their right to the same. The Cov Cath boys deserve to go back to school and learn a better way. Their chaperones and teachers and administrators and parents deserve to go back to their daily lives, generally not harming anybody, and try to do better. The Black Hebrew Israelites and the Indigenous March members, likewise. All the outrage mobs, leftist and rightist, need to go back home and switch to decaf on this one. Because nobody involved in this idiotic conflict committed assault. Nobody involved in this idiotic conflict broke the law. And nobody did anything particularly right either. Decaf. Move on.
3) Two groups of people deserve to be punished here: the media and anyone who threatened or called for violence upon any of the parties involved. Because conversely, while you may be called out for your free speech, you cannot legally be threatened with bodily harm or death and you cannot legally have your character defamed in print without sufficient evidence. What the media did in widely circulating highly edited and skewed accounts including names and addresses of these kids without getting all the facts first was LIBEL and it is becoming a habit. It is a habit because the goal of the media these days is not truth but rather ratings and they just LOVE a good outraged mob. And that habit of libel without consequences is going to escalate to people getting hurt by said outraged mob. Not just offended, but harmed. Can we please go back to "just the facts, ma'am?" Because, seriously, if the facts are in play in these media circuses, we suddenly find out that there is no one righteous. Just a whole lot of mistaken people and missed chances to listen to one another. And that's just... sad.
And the only people who are actually evil are all the people who use their Twitter platforms (and possibly also their blue checkmarks) to call for a bunch of kids to be fed into a wood chipper, etc., for the terrible crime of wearing MAGA hats while smiling, being rowdy, and generally acting in an impolite manner. Because, you know, calls for violence and actual threats are NOT protected under free speech. You can read the Constitution online, people. Google it.
As for me, I'm going to get off of Facebook and stop consuming this garbage because if I don't, I might stop believing that people are capable of reason, compassion, connection, and humanity.
