32. You should never judge how people react to a situation until you have been in that situation yourself.
This past year has been filled with people who can't wait to tell you what they would do if they were in certain situations. Frankly, they are starting to piss me off. The most publicized one has been the on-going Penn State sex abuse scandal. Everybody with a microphone will stand up and tell you how they would have reacted if they had been in Joe Paterno's shoes and what he should have done instead. Bobby Bowden has done several interviews in which he said that he didn't think Paterno did enough to follow up on the allegations of what he was told by graduate assistant Mike McQueary and thinks he should have done things differently. With several players arrested under his watch I don't think it is Bowden's place to claim the moral high ground. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying a couple kids getting drunk and fighting is the same, I just believe Bowden's focus was always on winning football games and nothing else, so he didn't run the cleanest of programs.) To me this is a situation I just hope to never find myself in, because I think it would be awful. Because of that I don't think anyone should be quick to snap to a judgement.
Personally, I say "There but for the grace of God go I." Sure, I would like to think I would react by running to the police and demanding a thorough investigation, but thankfully I wasn't put in that position. There is a chance that I would be frozen out of disbelief. I'm almost positive that if I had known someone for thirty years and was told they had committed a series of crimes I would be disinclined to believe it, because humans by nature like to think we know the people around us. Everyone always makes the right choice when talking about these kids of situations, because anyone can be a hypothetical hero. You saw people being interviewed on the street, saying that if it was their kid they would have killed Sandusky themselves and, "No jury in the world would convict me." Yeah, well it's fine to say that like an actor in a movie, but this isn't some shitty made-for-TV soap opera, this is real life. People go to prison when they kill other people, even if they think they have a good reason. Most of those tough-talkers would have done what the actual families of the victims did, which is blame themselves and feel as though this was their fault for letting it happen. When the time for action finally arrives my guess is that most of those people who tell others how to react would show that they can talk a big game, but not do much differently.
We're also seeing this kind of hypothetical heroism in the world of politics. As this is an election year, people are out stomping for one candidate or another and the only thing these people apparently have in common is that they always make the quick and correct decision. Apparently, this will be the first group of politicians in history who will never make a bad decision once we put them in office. They should just cut to the chase and release bumper stickers which say, "Screw my opponent, I always know what to do." At least, that was the general theme of every Republican debate I watched: this is what Obama said he would do, but he didn't. Here's what I'm going to do, but I'm actually going to do it. Again sounds all well and good, but the reality is that none of these people have any idea what the job of being Leader of the free world entails, so for them to act as though they have it figured out before taking office is laughable. I'm sure every politician in history has gone in with big ideas, only to discover that actually getting those ideas in place is really very hard. You have to coexist with a bunch of people who don't want to work with you for no other reason than which party you belong to. I'm reminded of a quote by JFK about his first 100 days in office, "I think the most surprising thing is that things are really as bad as we said they were."
Fortunately, there are some people out there ready to occasionally call people on their absurd claims. For example, when Marky Mark Wahlberg did an interview in which he said that if he has been on Flight 93 on 9/11, as he had originally been scheduled, things would have turned out differently. Fairly quickly people started to point out that things can be rather different when you are in real danger versus having a stunt coordinator off to the side to make sure everyone pulls the punches at the appropriate time, so maybe the wannabe-rapper-turned-actor should shut his damn mouth. Just because you can look tough on camera when everyone is being paid to ignore the fact that you are actually 5'5", it doesn't make you truly tough. It took all of one day for Wahlberg to issue an apology. Just let that be a reminder for us all when we hear about someone in a sticky situation: we all think we would do the right thing, we all hope we'd do the honorable thing. But unless you've actually been there and done it, just shut up and pray you never have to find out.
Previously:
I turned 30.
Then I was 31.
Birthday Anthem:
So, I assume you guys know how this works. For those of you who may be new, allow me to explain: the first song I heard today became my birthday anthem for the year. This means that anytime this song plays for the next 365 days... well, nothing special happens. It just reminds me I had a birthday. At least I really like this song.
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