Adults Behaving Badly

Today’s post is not full of rainbows and unicorns, so serve yourself some ice cream before digging in…

You see, like yours probably is, my news feed has been full of “adults behaving badly.” From plagiarists to digital piracy sites to the college admissions scandal, cheaters appear to be having their heyday and many peeps are rightfully up in arms.

For the record, aside from fudging my weight on my driver’s license, I have never cheated. I have, however, watched it happen. It’s been over thirty years, so I’m guessing it’s beyond the statute of limitations, but I SAW it happening, KNEW it was happening. Each time, the cheater looked me in the eye as if daring me to stop them. We were always in a room of our peers, but somehow I was the one expected to raise the alarm.

I never did.

Let’s be honest. Part of my silence was fear. No one likes a tattletale. Don’t shoot the messenger. You don’t rat on your friends. There’s a real social risk for those who choose to speak up and expose injustice and wrongdoing, and we as a society communicate that to others early and often. I was nothing if not a quick learner.

But, the other reason I didn’t say anything was, oddly enough, pity. I actually felt sorry for the cheaters. What was their home life like that they cared so little about personal integrity, felt so unseen they were driven to act out, or felt so disadvantaged that they needed to cheat to feel they’d gotten their due?

With the recent college admissions scandal, I’ve seen a lot of name-calling and blame-laying and, yes, some very righteous outrage. It ticks me off that those who are already ahead of the game in life feel they somehow deserve more for themselves and their offspring to the point where they will lie and cheat and pay obscene amounts of money so their kids can get into the best schools–when so many others struggle and scrimp only to be squeezed out of the race. It stings to have the myth of a meritocracy proven untrue. It makes playing by the rules feel like being punked. Those cheaters should PAY. Right?

But we know they don’t. Usually, like in high school, they get away with it. Sometimes they get caught, are publicly shamed, but usually, they graduate, get jobs, have families, and we never know whether they now and then feel a bit ashamed of that time they stole a glance at the test in the filing cabinet when the teacher was out of the room or bribed their kid’s way into college. It’s all one long, ugly continuum. The slippery-slope we’ve all been warned about.

It galls me that there will always be a fraction of the population that believes cheating is their right. And a part of me will always wonder if my silence allowed those early cheaters to live a life without consequence.

But, and this is the unpopular opinion I’m now going to voice, I’m having a hard time coming down with full vengeance on the kids here. I look at my own teens, at 19 and 16, and I know they aren’t fully cooked. Being a teen or young adult in today’s world is rough. Their school dress-codes sexualize them before they hit puberty, cell phones mean there is a permanent digital record of every teachable moment they might experience on their way to adulthood, and everything from politics to social media influencers suggests that success is measured as much by who you know as who you are. That is a level of stress most of us never had to navigate. But in the last week, I’ve seen the teens/young adults involved in the cheating scandal treated with more vicious outrage than the adults who committed the fraud, and it troubles me. It troubles me, because I’ve said and done some pretty thoughtless, privileged, hurtful things in my life, and thank heaven they only exist in the memories of those who were there to witness them. Hopefully their sting has faded and the hurt they may have caused is replaced with the goodwill of my words and actions in the years since.

Absolutely, all involved in this scandal should be held accountable as is appropriate, including expulsion. Both the administrators who were complicit and the families involved should suffer real professional, legal and personal consequences. Restitution should be made for those students whose slots were stolen. But, if we can’t expose the cheating without resorting to death threats and name-calling and scorched earth fury, we run the risk of losing the empathy, integrity, and general sense of fair play we’re fighting so hard to preserve.

In the end, it’s been a rough week with the time change and a head cold, and I mostly want to hide in bed and NOT DEAL. I also don’t want to face that when I think about this scandal, I have to own that I’ve played a part in a society that has habitually turned a blind eye to self-serving, privileged behavior and threatened those who expose it, and morality is rarely clean and crisp and distant. It’s right here in the room, playing out in real time in front of us, daring us to engage, and our response can be harsh or apathetic or empathetic or somewhere in between, because we’re human and trying, and while I haven’t cheated, I’m not without blame.