Youthful Indiscretion

The psychic terrorism of cry-bullies

I went to High School during the late 90's in a small rural town. Outside the high school were waves of cornfields on the outskirts of the village with the blue water tower close by. Sports were the staple of social life, especially football and basketball with track in the spring taken with minimal seriousness. Every parent knew each other, and classes were large enough to have cliques but small enough where everyone interacted with one another regularly. Given we only have a dozen teachers in the entire school, at some point every student would have every teacher. They knew who the trouble-makers were, the jokers, the serious academics, and the students in-between. Because of this knowledge, even when indiscretions occurred, they dealt with the kids and understood how malicious or not the intent was. The worst that happened was a fight under the water tower around every month with clearly set rules.

The school connected to the internet my sophomore year, and I would have to suffer browsing in Quarterdeck Mosaic while using Altavista to scour the new firehose of information at my disposal. There was no social media yet, and the only permanent reminder of our antics was the occasional photograph and the memories of our friends.

Like every school with young men overrun with raging hormones, there were shenanigans.

On one occasion, we had a guest speaker at the final hour. These things are inundated with speakers who somehow failed at everything else in life and joined the circuit going from school to school. It was the usual motivational stuff about following your dreams, never giving up, blah, blah blah. Pure filler slop schools think they need to have every month. For the last part of his act, he told how it was always his aspiration to be a talk show host, so he made a mock-up of a late night comedy show and picked a random person in the audience to be his guest. He selected the running back of the football team, known well for a rebellious edge and a wicked sense of humor. He spent the entire interview with the exasperated speaker pretending he was Adolf Hitler, ending the conversation with a Sieg Heil to the assembly, who erupted in thunderous applause.

Later in life, he became a successful engineer.

Another occasion was another pointless staple of High School life, Pride Week (school pride, not the other kind). The finale was always a WrestleMania performance, where a bunch of people would create bombastic personas and "wrestle" on a massive blue mat. The principal of my senior year forgot to vet the contestants, and we were introduced to "The Backdoor Bikers", with a couple of my classmates walking out in tight spandex and shirts several sizes too small. Next, a duo called the KQ made their appearance, complete with pointed hoods. To say the admins were horrified would be an understatement. Even in our 90% white town, joking about the KKK was verboten. 

Later in life, one became an engineer, and another became an HVAC technician.

For a far less legal example, a group of teenagers had a night on the town in the back of their truck. Getting bored with the usual stuff, one of them grabbed a baseball bat and went through the countryside, smashing all the mailboxes as they careened through the dirt roads. The lead instigator had to pay heavy restitution to the property he damaged and barely avoided juvenile detention.

He's now a successful farmer.

These memories came back to me as I saw the latest outrage on social media where some High School teens spelled out the Gamer Word for a photograph. The superintendent, outraged, canceled homecoming for the entire school for these six kids having the gall to spell it out. Many on Twitter wanted blood, clamoring to ruin the kid's lives forever. They called for a full investigation into the school, the parents, and other intrusive means to make sure everyone got to the bottom of these white kids' reckless use of the Forbidden Word. Expulsion wasn’t even off the table.

Anyone who lived a normal youth understands what those guys were doing. One of them had an idea to be transgressive and to add a little excitement to an absurdly boring academic life and got his friends on board. They wanted to have a good laugh and get a reaction from the scolds in charge. Twenty years ago after doing something like this, these guys would sit in a meeting with the principal, who would dole out a lunch suspension, and the entire matter would be forgotten within a couple weeks. They understood kids do stupid stuff, and violating taboos has been the bread and butter of teen bonding for generations.

Just to be clear, I don't find any of the above agreeable, especially not in a school setting, and administration is justified in meting out punishment. It is clear though this is a prank and a local affair and not a national scandal. People on social media, in their ideological bubble, think these guys are just a nudge away from murdering some black guy out of hate, beating a gay man to the edge of death, or driving a trans person to suicide. There's a complete disconnect between the context and intent of the transgression. Also, the idea of collective retribution for the actions of a few is anathema to American society, and it's disconcerting to see it done so commonly.

This is not just a left-wing thing either, though it's most cases because of institutional power. A couple years back, there was a social media furor over some basketball players dressing in drag for a pep rally and giving a burlesque-type performance. Again, pretty uncouth to do at a school, but there was a right-wing mob on social media exclaiming how it was normalizing drag queens and the school was openly teaching woke ideology. Anyone could look at the context and see it was nothing of the sort. The all-state football lineman at my school gave a similar performance I still laugh about to this day. Just twenty years ago this was common, and there are instances of this being done as far back as World War II. They weren't making a political message. Big, muscular guys dressing in drag and talking in a screeching voice is simply hilarious. 

More tragic still is the fact that anyone can use this as blackmail material to stop these kids from getting into college, finding a job, or countless other normal parts of living. Kyle Kashute famously had his acceptance into Harvard rescinded for saying the Gamer Word in a recording. The grossest part of this was someone was clearly holding this back to apply maliciously in the future. This sort of character destruction creates an incredibly toxic and stifling environment in a world where everything is recorded and everyone is paranoid about what they say being used against them decades later. This gives unfathomable power to vindictive busybodies and small, cruel people who get off at ruining other people's lives. It's an epidemic of cry-bullies who are far more damaging than their targets.

When I did Juvy ministry, a common theme was to get the kids on the right path, graduate, and escape their terrible childhood. Kids often became caught up with a bad crowd and joined a gang for protection. The gangs then manipulated them to steal from relatives and give the proceeds to the leader. True, some kids were stone-cold killers, but some simply needed to escape the hellscape they lived in, which we tried to help facilitate. With luck, many of them would stay crime-free either by joining the military or finding employment after high school, and then request their criminal record to be expunged. This is how it should be, as even some of the worst punks in my youth married and lived a good life.

Crimes like assault and arson can be expunged if done before 18, but a social media video where a guy shouts a racial slur is forever. Those six kids who pulled a prank will always have to look over their shoulder to see if some vindictive creep on the internet stalks them and send the picture to his employer a decade from now, or possibly a close friend. It can't even qualify as blackmail, since these people do it solely for the thrill of being able to tear someone down. This doesn't even get into the real threat that a colleague will use it as a cudgel to get his way. This would be illegal but damaging all the same to the victim.

To avoid the reign of terror our youth have to contend with, there needs to be legal measures to remove the possibility of vindictive people trying to ruin people's lives. Just like there should be an expungement of a criminal record when a kid goes clean, there needs to be an expungement of these incidents from social media on request. This also means recordings scumbags keep in their back pocket to hurt someone can't be used . Way too much power has been given to grotesque busybodies with a chip on their shoulder that is making it hard to live a normal life, and it needs to end. 

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