Moral Priorities

Our son Benjamin is learning new words at lightning speed, and in two languages no less. He's starting to get to that age where he can form a full enough sentence to make mistatements or out-loud ponderings that can embarrass Mommy and Daddy (i.e., ”wasn't Daddy in the bed!” shouted to the entire supermarket).

Sometimes the thing that slips out of a toddler's mouth and embarrasses Mom and Dad is a swear word, which are of course especially banished in my home country. But anyone who's been within 100 meters of Fredrik and I will know that we don't give a fuck if Benjamin says fuck. In fact, I'm not proud – though not embarrassed – to admit that we might actually have been encouraging it lately. My philosophy is that it's not the words, but the content, that is okay or not. If it's swear words that are bad, does that mean it's more taboo to say ”I'm so fucking tired” than to look a person in the face and say ”You're an ugly idiot”?

I feel we have no reason to actively discourage language we use ourselves – and since our son will never hear us use words, curse- or otherwise, to denegrate a human being, to hurt someone's feeling, to judge a person by anything other than their actions or statements, then we think he's going to turn out alright. This is a household where it's perfectly acceptable to say ”Ow, fuck!” when you stub your toe but not acceptable to say ”She's a fucking bitch.” The choice of vocabulary is completely irrelevant as a measurement of moral quality.

Anyone who's been within 100 meters of me lately also knows that I've fallen in love with Tim Minchin. A carrot-topped Australian piano virtuoso comedian with a Shakespearian vocabulary, a hard-on for rationality, Atheism, and both grammar and math jokes? I'd be hard-pressed to ask for more. His songs have been playing constantly around the Paulsson-Ceangailte household lately, and Benjamin has a favorite. The Pope Song. (The quality of that particular film is not the best, but the performance is as fabulous as ever and I WAS THERE! Ahem. I digress.) The lyrics consist of at least 40% ”fuck” if I'm forced to estimate. The chorus is, to make a long story short, ”fuck the mother-fucking pope.” Benjamin likes to dance to the song and, when it's over, cries ”again, again, more fucka fucka!” Am I now a hypocrite after saying that we don't teach him to use words to slander people? Not at all. Anyone with an ounce of listening comprehension will listen to the song and hear that it has two messages. It's not about mocking religion or a belief in God. The fact that the pope is a religious figure is at most indirectly related to Minchin's rancor. The first message: the pope has protected priests that have molested and raped children. The second message: we are a sad society if we are more offended by the word ”fuck” than the support and adoration of one billion Catholics for a man and an organization that protects child rapists. The song is as much a deceptively potty-mouthed masterpiece of social commentary as South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. ”Horrific, deplorable violence (and war) is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words!”

DO we live in a world where people can somehow torture up a moral relativity where child rape isn't a big deal? The message this week is, depressingly, yes. The news from Penn State reads like something out of some dark and misanthropic cousin to the Onion.

For those of you who haven't read or heard the news and might still have some hope for humankind, here's the summary: assistant coach Jerry Sandusky of Penn State's football team is being charged with a long string of crimes involving molesting and raping children. The allegations state that he used his workplace – specifically, the showers in the locker room – as the scene of his crimes. Further, that his colleagues, including the head coach Joe Paterno, were aware of his crimes and did jack squat, allowing them to continue.

Now that Sandusky has been arrested, Paterno has been fired because of his role as an accomplice to Sandusky's crimes. Riots have ensued on the campus of Penn State. But sadly, the riots are not in outrage over the fact that their school was a shameful party to years unimaginably heinous acts. They're rioting in outrage over the firing of their beloved head coach, who has ”done so much for the university”.

In Jon Stewart's report over the incident on the Daily Show, we hear that among the allegations is an incident in which a 6'5” man walked into the showers and was an eyewitness to Sandusky raping a child, and that the man did NOTHING. The description of this incident is in no way graphic, but has upset me so much that I'm a bit off-kilter. We had friends visiting last night and the topic of these Penn State riots came up, so Fredrik wanted to show them the Daily Show video, but I told him that I couldn't stomach listening to the description again.

I'm aware of the fact that other voices have come out of Penn State this week, and that the upside is that most people are genuinely outraged over what has happened to child victims. But that the first voices we heard on the subject were from people who had so violently missed the point, and that there were enough of them to constitute RIOTS, leaves a person speechless.

As usual with my blog posts, I have no conclusion, no happy ending, no deep philosophical seed of wisdom to impart. I'm really just getting it off my chest: the idea that people can muster up collective moral outrage over a slight blow to their sports program instead of pondering the hideousness of human nature revealed by this case sickens me. The priority given to sports programs at American universities has always been outrageously inflated compared to the priority given to the universities' actual mission of educating people, but this takes it to tragicomic proportions.

So I will continue to be perfectly fine with Benjamin throwing the word ”fuck” around. I have sense and priorities enough to know that that's much better than him becoming a rapist.