I live in Fort Myers, Florida. On May 23, 2001, our local newspaper reported that a senior at Estero High School had been found to have a steak knife on the passenger-side floor board of her car while the car was parked on school property. The 18-year-old was arrested and jailed and was also suspended from school for five days. Because May is graduation month, this young woman was denied the privilege of marching with her classmates in the high school graduation she had anticipated and worked toward for thirteen years.
A National Merit Scholar with no record of disciplinary issues was suspended and incarcerated on “a felony charge of possession of a weapon on school property” (Associated Press) because of the Fort Myers school system’s recently adopted zero-tolerance policy toward having weapons on campus. The young woman and her family said the knife was inadvertently left in the car after she had moved some possessions over the weekend, and she was not even aware that it was there until school officials spotted it and approached her. According to the May 23, 2001, Associated Press article, “Sheriff Lt. Bill Byrus said he sympathizes with Brown, but said the arrest is not up to the discretion of the officer or based on the student’s behavior record.”
I don’t know this young woman, but my heart went out to her when I read her sad news almost 18 years ago. I’ve been reminded of the incident recently because of the zero tolerance attitudes of government officials and the media toward any wrong-doing of those in public life, regardless of how isolated the incident or how long ago it occurred. President Clinton famously claimed not to have inhaled the marijuana he smoked in college to appease critics who thought any use of weed at any time in one’s life constituted a disqualification from ever serving in public office.
Examples such as these demonstrate clearly the down side of zero tolerance. Zero tolerance is right-hearted but wrong-headed. It focuses on the worst day of a person’s life, whether or not the actions of that day were done with malicious intent or were the result of accidental circumstances, carelessness, youthful indiscretion, or plain ol’ human stupidity. It gives no credit for the hundreds of other days on which the person may have done quite outstanding things such as earning the rank of National Merit Scholar or gaining the public trust necessary for election to high political office.
News flash! Human beings do stupid things. All of us. We do them when we’re young, and we do them when we’re old. Powerful people do them, and not-so-powerful people do them. The question is which stupid things warrant altering the course of another person’s life. Does any one of us want our epitaph to set in stone the worst thing we ever did? I certainly don’t. I’ve done some pretty stupid things, but I hope when I’m gone those won’t be the first things that come to mind when my name is mentioned. I hope I can do enough good things to make love, compassion, intelligence, activism for social justice, and caring for my family my enduring legacy. I want to be remembered for my best day, not my worst; and I feel certain every person reading this article will say the same.
Zero tolerance is right-hearted. Everyone, especially our leaders, should be held to high moral standards; and even the occasional racial slur or act of bigotry must not be allowed to be considered normal. Laws for carrying weapons should also be uniformly enforced.
Yet individual circumstances can’t be ignored, and grace must always be an option. My mother lost a small pair of scissors to the TSA in 2002 because of the new zero-tolerance policies for carrying any potential weapon onto an airplane. I was shown grace in 2011 when I stupidly tried to board a plane with eight steak knives in my carry-on. When I explained to the kind TSA agent that we had just buried my mother five days earlier and that these were some of her possessions and that my head was obviously not screwed on straight at that moment, she allowed me to exit the screening area and return to the ticket counter where I could check the bag. Same rules, same offense, different circumstances, and different results.
And that’s why zero tolerance is wrong-headed. Such policies ensnare officials in a web of their own rigid rules. They allow no room for judgment, for considering mitigating factors, for looking at individual circumstances, for showing grace. Should students ever be permitted to deliberately carry any kind of weapon onto a school campus? Absolutely not. I believe, however, that intent is the key. When a sheriff’s deputy has to say that he is left with no option other than incarcerating an 18-year-old and denying her the privilege of participating in the high school graduation ceremony for which she had worked and which is for most of us the highlight of our first two decades of life, something is clearly wrong. When a man or woman demonstrates his or her qualifications to serve as president, should minor drug use decades earlier carry more weight than the person’s more recent accomplishments and qualifications for the job? Zero tolerance policies cause officials to be hoist with their own petard (caught in their own trap, hanged on their own scaffold), to summon Shakespeare.
So I guess you’ve figured out by now where this is going. In recent years, photos and videos, along with personal accusations and testimonies, frequently emerge from closets to be spread across social media with the speed of a blazing wild fire. Many political aspirations have been dashed by such discoveries, and many more reputations have been tarnished by photographic evidence of past unacceptable behavior. In some cases, the judgment is warranted, but can the same rigid standard be applied to every situation? Does elapsed time mitigate the offense? Do cultural changes have a bearing? Does the accused person’s overall character and pattern of behavior temper the severity of the single action?
Most recently on the media hot seat, as you know unless you’ve spent this week in coma, is Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia. Governor Northam is a Democrat, but the calls for his resignation are bipartisan. Thirty years ago, he was photographed for his medical school yearbook wearing either blackface or a KKK hood. He initially admitted to being one of the two young men in the photo, then later denied that he was either of them. The changing story is grounds for concern and possible censure. But is the fact that he did this one stupid and racist thing thirty years ago enough to disqualify him for the rest of his life from serving in elected office? Do the things he has done since that photo was taken count for anything? According to reporting in The Washington Post, ” In public office, Northam worked to expand Medicaid, the health program that serves the poor, and he helped to restore voting rights for felons, a policy that helps many black men. Many in the black community saw him as an ally, and as one of the good guys.” One stupid moment vs years of being “one of the good guys.” Which should prevail?
Most disturbing of all is that most of the conversation surrounding this debate has little to do with Governor Northam, his compensating qualities, or his being a human deserving of a chance at redemption. It’s all about what these allegations mean for his party’s chances at dominating Virginia government. It’s politics, not a human life, that’s keeping people up at night.
Another incident you’re also aware of if you’ve remained conscious for the last eighteen months is Al Franken’s forced resignation from the Senate on January 2, 2018. Many still have not reconciled his offense with the severity of the punishment. Allegations of sexual misconduct before his 2008 election to the Senate led to bipartisan demands for his resignation, to which he acceded; yet many still feel conflicted about his being driven from an office in which he did so much good. The zero tolerance of the #metoo movement defined his life by a few mistakes, admittedly reprehensible, instead of allowing him to apologize and continue his leadership in reforming health care and other causes on which he brought his strong progressive values to bear. Did we as a nation lose more than we gained by forcing a flawed but decent and intelligent leader from the power chambers of our government?
Should Brett Kavanaugh have been denied a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court because of Christine Blasey-Ford’s allegations of sexual misconduct when they were in high school? Although I believe what she said, her claims were uncorroborated, so it’s difficult to say what their effect should have been. I’m far more disturbed by his entitled attitude and public temper tantrums during the Senate hearings. He lacks the temperament to sit on our highest court, and he fails to recognize that such an appointment is a high honor and privilege, not his birthright for being born into wealth and entitlement. I’m also disturbed by his failure to own past misconduct, such as his irresponsible drinking habits, and to show evidence of having evolved and matured. I don’t think it’s necessary to go back thirty years to disqualify him.
Here’s another question: What’s culture got to do with it? My sister once confided in one of our aunts, who was born in 1926, that a man my sister worked for had made an inappropriate pass at her. Our aunt’s response was, “Honey, in my day we considered that a compliment!” Does that justify the man’s action? Of course not. Wrong is wrong, but cultural norms alter our response and what we’re willing to accept and condone.
Was wearing blackface, during a time when doing so seemed an innocent entertainment costume, a racist act? Was Al Jolson racist? Wrong is wrong, no matter when it is done, but I think the cultural norms of the time have to be considered. When I was growing up, the N-word was in common use. Was it morally right? Nope, not then or now. But by the cultural norms of the mid-twentieth century, it was accepted. Should everyone who used the N-word during that time be forever banned from public service? I would say that those who still use the word are demonstrating their racism and should be disqualified. Those whose use of the word was limited to a period in time and who have been willing to evolve to more enlightened standards of conduct, however, I would not consider racist. I believe we would deprive ourselves of many good leaders if we accepted only those whose conduct has been above reproach on every day of their lives. In fact, no one would qualify by those rules.
We must distinguish between people who have done a few stupid things and those for whom racism and corruption have been patterns of behavior. Did I mention that ALL human beings have done a few stupid things? Okay. Then which of us is qualified to throw that first stone? We also have to ask ourselves where we’re going to draw the line between flawed human stupidity and patterns of behavior that indicate moral deficiency. Look to some of our most esteemed leaders, and you’ll find in every one of them some record of moral failing.
Punishing folks for violating standards that were not part of the cultural norms at the time of their actions is retroactive enforcement of current rules. If the City of Fort Myers posts a No Left Turn sign at an intersection today, can they issue me a ticket for turning left there last week? If making a left turn at that intersection is considered dangerous, it was just as dangerous last week, last month, and last year; but no one had yet determined that the danger was great enough to warrant prohibiting left turns left at that place. If Costco starts charging for their samples (Relax! It’s not happening!), can they force me to pay for all of the samples I’ve eaten while they’ve been free? That would be both unfair and impractical. Retroactive rule enforcement doesn’t work.
In January 2011, the newspaper The Guardian announced the soon-to-be-published new, sanitized edition of Mark Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a move to counter the censorship that had landed Huck Finn on banned books lists and caused it to be dropped from many school curricula, a publisher decided to expurgate the more than 200 occurrences of the N-word from Twain’s work. I don’t even know where to start on this. I taught this novel many times, and before each reading of it, I talked with classes about whether the language would be a problem for them. Not a single student ever refused to read the book because of the language; they consistently responded that they understood the novel was set in a specific time and culture. We did not use the word in my classroom, but I felt college students should be mature enough to witness another culture and perhaps to grow from the experience.
Mark Twain was a master of dialect. In an introductory note, he explains:
“In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect, the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four variations of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike, and not succeeding.”
He signed it “The author.”
As a reader, I felt my experience was greatly enhanced by being able to “hear” the characters’ speech, instead of just reading standard-English words on a page. Oral reading of passages made the characters come to life even more vividly.
Written dialect records the common speech of a region, and that speech consists of both pronunciation and vocabulary. The N-word in Twain’s time and location was even more common by far than it was during my youth. Have we become so delicate that we can’t look honestly at other cultures’ ways of life and speech without judging them by our own standards and banning them from our education? If so, we are greatly impoverishing our education, and that’s a tragedy.
The Guardian article quotes Dr. Sarah Churchwell, “senior lecturer in US literature and culture at the University of East Anglia,” who said the changes in Twain’s work made her angry.
“The fault lies with the teaching, not the book. You can’t say ‘I’ll change Dickens so it is compatible with my teaching method’. Twain’s books are not just literary documents but historical documents, and that word is totemic because it encodes all of the violence of slavery. The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won’t always be nice and benign. It’s dumbing down.”
Have we reached the point that masterpieces of the past have to be dumbed down for us to tolerate them? If so, how pathetic we are.
And from the same Guardian article:
“Geff Barton, head of King Edward’s School in Bury St Edmunds, described the idea of changing Twain’s language as ‘slightly crackpot’. ‘It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can’t credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts.’”
It’s even more depressing that adults can’t be credited with seeing texts in their context. We can’t erase our national guilt for racism, sexual misconduct, and all the rest by denying their existence or attempting to expunge the record. Nor can we erase our collective guilt by singling out individuals to be offered up as scapegoats or sacrificial lambs so that we can feel better about ourselves.
Our country (and every other country in the world) has always been led by imperfect humans who have a few skeletons hanging in their closets. Would our country be richer or poorer if we had banished Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Martin Luther King Jr from national leadership?
Can we set a few reasonable criteria by which we judge the merits and demerits of our fellow humans? How long ago did they do the stupid thing for which they’re being called to give account? Was it a one- or two-time incident or part of a morally degenerate pattern of behavior? Have they honestly owned their moral failing? Have they made amends for it? Have they in the intervening years grown and behaved differently? Does the conduct reflect a moral deficiency or just a lapse in judgment? These are not black-and-white issues; and although I fully support holding people accountable for their behavior, I can’t condone writing the final judgment on someone’s life based on their worst day. As the saying goes, “Let him who is without sin . . .”
And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few photos to burn.