Hey, Steubenville: Where Was Everyone?

Ma'am;... One smart cookie concluded that where animals are mistreated, people are treated little better... You may be able to avoid it; but many people cannot escape brutality, and some times it is so near that it gets up and crushes the life out of them... I grew up in a brutal place among brutal people... They are so much nicer now... But just down the street, some kid harrassed at school killed himself... In my day, everyone fought... People took their limit of crap, and then they fought because they weren't going to get no sympathy from parents or friends or anyone... I imagine a few girls were raped or made drunk or otherwise pressured into sex... A kitten never stood a chance... You literally never saw a cat more than once... I lost two kittens to the mob when I was little... It was a lesson on what was in store for me...
I would have been remarkable if the brutality to which I was exposed did not make me brutal... Some times I think my parents did as much to make me heartless as anyone I ever knew, and they are nice people by most standards, made brutal through brutal times: depression, war, cold war...
Behind the facade of society the immorality of everyone is taking a toll, and on the kids... If you took some primitive outside of his community he would not want any thing so much as to get back where he belonged... Our kids are immoral, and their sense of freedom is immorality... They want nothing better than to get out of sight of their parents so they can be themselves, be free, and free of rules and formality...
Just as every community was once protection for its members, they were also representative of it, and because of universal group responsibility, if you screwed up, they were coming for the group, anyone they could lay hands on would serve...People could tell their friend from the enemy... A big part of formality is recognition, as in uniforms; but some acts of recognition require a line up...
With the growth of the idea of the individual power, group responsibility and group obligations have died... No one is going to hang the parents for what the kids do... If they are black, the community will pay; but not because they can police their own... It is simply injustice to hold them responsible...
Once people have escaped brutality, it is hard for them to consider the stresses and threats children are raised with... They may have the morality they learned through their mothers, but mother snatched from babies to serve the machine have little to teach in the way of morality but something of the general lack of it...We may never be personally violent... As we grow old, we so seldom hit or are hit, that we forget what a bone cracking brain jarring experience it can be... I remember... Only because I still spar...
Kids need families and support, and families need powers and support... Part of the brutality we all used to suffer from our parents is due to the fact that our families were powerless... If we did not learn to obey, they could not stop the police from hauling us to jail... People still pay blood money in this world... If some one could get away with bloodshed, families would get together and work out a deal if at all possible to not compound one death with two...Parents powerless against law are not able to teach a primary lesson in morality that they do not have time to teach if they could...Children may as well be guppies for the parenting the get.
If it was within the power of parents to keep their kids at home, and if instead of having kids exposed to all manor of immorality on tv, they could be raised with a clear sense of morality by parent there to do so, and if government did not do so much to thwart justice with law, or if it were not so brutal with sentencing, the kids would stand a chance... All parents have now is a hope that the kids are smart enough to figure things out before they reach 18, and have the book thrown at them... So many have been brutalized in the process of growing up, and if arrested are more brutalized, that when they are tossed into prison they are tossed into their true community, one they will understand and identify with...
Some people forget the violence of their youth... They call it moving on... I cannot... My scars are too deep... But I know their purpose...Most of us lead lives remarkable for their pain and self denial... Scars, numbness was pretty cool when the sun was blazing hot and I was dying of thirst; when the wind chill was forty below and I was about ten hours out in it, cow hide from bottom to top, duct taped sleeves, froze board froze... If any of us was not scarred up and numb, we would howl like dogs at the misery of our lives...But we are innured to it, dried up, insensitive to the brutality...
People are trapped in desparation... They have meaningless jobs, jobs where the sight of their contribution to production is denied them, and so the meaning of it, which is denied with their wages since if they were doing anything worthwhile with their lives, their lives would be worth decent wages...No one not doing jobs that stiffle and deny all individuality that make cookie cutter objects out of cookie cutter workers can grasp how cruel and life denying is wage labor...
Ease can be difficult; and monotony can be torture, but people know that to have the little good that life allows them they must salute, and bow their heads, submit to their conditions, and show no snarl in their smiles... They cannot step outside the social norms or risk losing all that gives morality its meaning: Family, friends, and community...
The question is not why so many people go rogue, go postal, take out innocents in the process of neutralizing themselves; but why so few do so... So many people are so obviously dead, like zombies going through the motions of life but one step removed, living in the third person, as spectators... I don't want to cause them pain; but for even a brief moment to admit the pain they have...The do not feel their pain with any sort of consciousness; but they express their pain in violence or the desire to hurt or see hurt... Violence is a form of communication...
If you look at the rights of passage into adulthood for boys, such as we have in our society, they all involve pain, the denial of pain, the infliction of pain, and the minimizing of it... I saw a young girl hurt in a basketball game go to her father for comfort, trying to hold back her tears... He just held her at arms length and told her: You're OK; Rub some dirt on it... That is what we would tell our sons, and about what was told to us... And we do not grasp the danger of it, or the damage that we do...I think this ruined sports for that girl...It ruins many men completely...
When youth equates maturity with insensitivity, the ability to inflict pain without remorse, or endure it without pity the whole of your society is in the end stage of demoralizations...When we allow violence so long as it comes with rules, but do not allow children to fight it our with rules they have agreed upon before the first blow, we are teaching them that violence is fine so long as they are in control of it... It is possible that any boy capable of rape, and the sexual degradation of another person, or any girl who could witness it without objection has not already become numb, and insensitive to their own humanity... We do not mind... They are ready for bigger and better things at that point: meaningless drudgery, or capricious authority... Is it possible for anyone to believe that a rifle in the hands of a soldier does not have a dead man on either end of it??? One has to be dead in their soul to kill another...
The only thing that saved my life from the brutality which became me, that I inflicted and endured in turns was the memory of when I was a happy and sensitive child... Most people forget before a certain age, but I think all most all of my life, perhaps ever flashes of my birth may be remembered... What I forgot I forgot deliberately, how I became me, the human beast as uncaring of others as I was of myself, all raw hide and no flesh, like some character of the Iliad, incapable of remorse, introspection, self consciousness in a cosmic sense, denying the unfairness of life by the very effort to deserve the death life promised...
I was robbed of the very thing that made me unique among others: My sensitivity... It is this quality most essential to good relationships the loss of which makes so many men so terrible at relationships... My wife has been through some kind of hell, but she was never robbed of her sensitivity to others, her ability to care, to sense the needs and emotions of others without being told... That is why people love her; even me...
The choice I have made, to live out my life sensitive to the feelings of others, and to my own emotions was not a choice I was capable of making when I was young... When I became aware of the brutality of the people around me, I found my own parents we almost as bad... They would never torture a kitten to death, but they we were brutes, and in their own ways brutal, as life had made them... There is a sort of necessity to it though it is far from necessary as a practical matter, in this age... Our brutality is clearly an anachronism...An artifact of an earlier age...
Only a few hundred years before where I grew up there are accounts of natives cutting each other up, and burning enemies; and before their own eyes having them for lunch for the fill and entertainment of all... The priests did not like it; but they could not stop it...The pain of life, the threat of a precarious existence formed a flint hearted people... If you understand; the children could be as brutal as the adults in play, in the process of growing to defend their communities; but there was no doubt about who the enemy was, and who were ones friends, and as people burned their enemies, the enemies reminded them of the brutality they would enjoy in turn... This was all moral, even if insensitive and violent...
When we turn our violence on our own, when we are insensitive to the needs of others suffering brutality, and when we endure brutality as so much of our lives are -for fear we will lose our entire link to a moral and sensitve existence by any act of rebellion, then we doom our own children to the hell we suffer, and this- is not moral... Preparing children for a rat race, dog eat dog world is what dog and rat parents should do; and this is no job for a human parent... We need communities where it is safe to feel, to be sensitive in, where it is natural to care and normal to be cared for...Law and the economy both work at the destruction of community that once gone leaves individual breeding individuals, and raising animals...
Thanks...Sweeney

Great editorial, Diane! It is a painful lesson for all of us looking on in disbelief asking the same questions. Is this zero tolerance only making kids less likely to respond in emergency situations like this? What if we started an "Ice Program" to teach kids, parents, coaches involved so we don't have girls afraid of reporting rape? If kids felt that they were helping instead of getting their "friends" in trouble, maybe there would be different outcome like we saw in Steubenville. Amy Davis made this brilliant observation about how the two boys should see this as their own teaching moment. If they didn't get caught here, they would have continued this brutal and unbelievable behavior. I knew guys like that growing up and I can't stop thinking if they ever moved on. Some I know are coaching sports and teaching in the classroom. I hope their attitude about girls and women have changed since I remember.

Re: TheDonna;... Ma'am, those kids had the keys to the board room or to prison in their pockets... They had the ability to clique with people, and cliquers have an edge; but the real edge is to be able to take from and injure people without regret, or a momen of introspection... It is possible something very essential to them, even essential to human happiness was taken from before they could barely understand what it was... Brutality is commonplace, and it often begins in the crib, and those who cannot become numb to it will not survive, let alone thrive... Before that event, many of those people were thriving, with real potential, the devil's own handmaidens in long pants...Did we do it to them before they did it to us, because immitation is only flattery...
Does fine wine, a good meal, some sweet talk, dancing or a movie, a few unguarded intimacies landing you in bed with some one you will not give all your love to justify only because there are no charges that can be brought... I convict myself... Sex without love is violence, and it don't matter who shot john...
A lot of people are going through life with their most basic needs unmet who could not be the equal in any relationship where their needs were met... A whole lot of people are simply maimed by the process of getting them from babies to the point where they can serve the machine...Oh no! Some one was just hit outside your house by a truck, and they are laying there dying with half their insides ripped out... Do you want to see... Maybe it is some one you know... Is there no part of you that wants to dwell for a second on the news... Maybe you are the one well person in the world that is not intrigued by human misery and depravity... And if that is the case, then good for you...