Responsibility

Reading accounts of his sentencing hearing is an exercise in listening to the convoluted and self-serving logic of Jerry Sandusky and his wife (who claims these things could not have happened because she never saw them happening, asking others to ignore the fact that many of the incidents happened in the men's locker room and showers at Penn State--a place she herself would of necessity have spent very little time in). It is an exercise in listening to them blame the boys who accused him of abuse, blame them for wrecking Jerry's life, for "misunderstanding," in effect all the things he was in his own mind doing to help them, to make men out of them, to help them grow up.

He wasn't helping them grow up, he was stopping them from being children. It's a different thing.

But his spin allows him to remain the victimized hero in his own narcissistic frame of mind--if that isn't giving narcissism a bad name. The kids from broken homes or deprived circumstances were supposed to be grateful and quiet. They're the problem--they didn't play by Jerry's rules. They are responsible for the mess.

Then we get the other side, grown men shooting three girls on the way home from school in order to stop them from spreading "western" ideas about things like allowing girls to go to school. Then standing up and taking credit, claiming "responsibility" for the act, as if this were in some way some sort of achievement for grown men.

In what distorted view of the world and of human worth is an attack by armed gunmen on an unguarded child in the company of other children an act worth taking credit for?  What is it about a worldview that allows for or even claims to require such an act for its continued existence? What values, whose "worth," does it promote? What fear drives such despicable and cowardly acts in the name of responsibility?

This is immaturity of the coarsest kind--the kind that again robs children of the opportunity to be children in order to make physical grown-ups feel that they are also "responsible" adults. It is the childish behaviour of playground bullies, bigger kids, or kids with more social clout, roaming in packs, claiming and protecting their overdetermined, self-appointed right to decide who gets to play on what equipment, under what rules.

The only mature and responsible mind in the crowd belongs to the girl who was their primary target-- Malala Yousufzai--who at 14 has for years shown nothing but true courage in the face of "adult" malice and stupidity. And some of that maturity and a huge measure of courage attaches to her friends and classmates who rode with her on that bus, having to know being anywhere near her put them in danger, too, given the months of threats against her and her family.

Of course, the "unguarded" aspect brings up some issues. The threats against the life of a child who has refused to be intimidated, even though she has openly expressed her fear of those she opposes, have been coming for months, yet her father refused the offer of armed escorts for her to and from school. It was unacceptable in his worldview and the culture of his region for a young girl like this to be and to be seen publicly in too close proximity to adult men. (Unfortunately, the gunMAN or MEN did not feel it inappropriate for them to be seen in such close proximity to a young girl, in public, to force their lethal intentions on her in the name of acceptable public order. )

In a way, for all the pride he has expressed in her campaign for the right of girls to pursue an education, her father is just a lesser version of the men who shot her--someone valuing a cultural practice ahead of the life of a member of that culture. His loyalties have to have been sorely tested in this period--and found strangely, even disastrously, lacking on that one point. He stands up for education for girls--even runs a school for girls--but also serves a tribal culture that in the end puts the girls in harm's way for a bigger principle.

There is a curious inversion of Sandusky-think here. Malala's father seems less bothered by what she is heard saying (or even by the fact that she speaks out at all); in fact, he supports her message. But he is tragically concerned with how and where she she is seen.

P.S.: Girls in that part of the world, or in any part of the world, will be safer only when the boys are properly educated to acknowledge that the girls are human beings, too, and worthy of being accepted as such, and taken seriously and treated with respect. Boys who are taught that girls need be both unseen and unheard get a disastrously distorted view of what constitutes male courage and male hegemony. Girls, they are taught, need to be kept in their inferior place, through force and fear.

But then, the cyberbullying that goes on in "the west" to keep peers in their places (below the level of those doing the bullying) suggests that girls need some education, too. Amanda Todd made one mistake of judgement, and was punished for it, punished for it to death. What is adolescence for, if not for making bad choices and learning from them. By that logic, I suppose cyberbullying is another bad choice, but one that allows for a dangerous level of disengagement and relative anonymity. It is the choice made by hit-and-run drivers on lonely roads late at night.