Too many people aren’t capable of grasping the fact that the world isn’t divided, Disney-style, into heroes and villains. Everyone falls in a different place on the spectrum, but the truth is that we’re all a mixture of good and bad. Every single one of us.
People don’t want to hear that, though. They want their
journalism like they want their fiction, with a clear-cut good guy and bad guy
they can in turns root for and revile. And so they get angry if we tell the
truth: that the murder victim had a criminal record, that the rapist was a
straight-A student, that the two people in a conflict were both partly right
and partly wrong.
I get it, it’s uncomfortable. Nobody wants to hear that Paul
Ropp, who was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison for shooting a police
officer in both legs and killing a police dog last spring during a robbery in
Portland, is a gifted pianist with a penchant for jazz who played keyboard in
my brother’s band. That he has a family who loves him. And that his partner in
crime Steve-O has a magnetic sense of humor that made him well-liked by a lot
of good people before he got mixed up in some pretty bad stuff.
Because if that’s the case, then one of your friends could
someday go to prison for committing a horrible crime. And nobody wants to
contemplate that when they could be merrily tapping away on their keyboard
suggesting the villain should be, in the words of one Oregonian commenter, shot
by a firing squad and “left to bleed out and die on the street.”
It goes the other way, too. Nobody wants to hear that
someone they admire has any flaws, or that someone with flaws might also do
some good in the world. And so they jump on the bandwagon to tear down anyone
who hasn’t managed to craft an image of perfection. Exhibit A: The guy who is
(depending on who you ask) either a sexist pig helping keep women from science
jobs, or a brilliant scientist who landed a spacecraft on a comet before being
unfairly victimized by oversensitive feminists.
Why can’t he just be the guy who is a great scientist and
also made an unfortunate choice to wear a shirt adorned with scantily-clad
women on television? Neither action cancels out the other, although you wouldn’t
think so by reading Twitter.
People want to shut the media up about this mixture of good
and bad we see in the world. They want to make all victims’ flaws off limits
and all perpetrators’ good qualities forbidden. They want all of their news served
up in a flawlessly-crafted narrative that allows them to be Team Darrell Wilson
or Team Michael Brown instead of Team “We’ll never know exactly what happened
that day in Ferguson, but it’s probable that different actions on either person’s
side could have prevented a tragedy.”
I once interviewed them family of a dead 20-year-old and the
family of the friend who dealt him a fatal punch during a drunken fight. One family
wanted a story about their angel baby boy being ruthlessly murdered. The other
wanted a story about their son’s life being ruined by a harsh prison sentence after
he defended himself against an alcoholic drug dealer flying into a dangerous
rage. The truth, it seemed after talking to the DA and police, was somewhere in
the middle.
That’s almost always the case, which is why picking one side
or the other to craft a hero versus villain narrative doesn’t do anyone any
good. People need the full story, not the stereotypes. If I ever have a
daughter I want her to grow up knowing that a guy with a “promising football
career” can be just as dangerous as a guy with a trench coat and no friends.
Both types have made news this year for becoming everything from rapists to
school shooters.
At the same time, I also want my future children to see the
good in the world. I want them to understand that people who make mistakes are
still valued human beings in God’s eyes. That people who go to prison sometimes
change their lives for the better and make a positive contribution to the world
once they get out again, that the fact that someone is homeless because they
made poor choices doesn’t change the fact that at the moment they’re cold and
hungry.
I want them to understand that everything is connected, and
that as much as the politically correct hate anything that remotely seems like “victim
blaming” the truth is things don’t always happen in a bubble.
And so I’ll continue to write that the crash victim wasn’t
wearing their seatbelt when they died, that the homeowner’s house burned down
because they left food on the stove unattended, that the car was stolen because
someone left it unlocked, and that the coroner said the victim of the fight would
still be alive if he hadn’t been drunk when he got punched in the head. Because
my writing those things might make the next crash victim decide to put on their
seatbelt, or the next potential car theft victim decide maybe they should lock
their car after all.
Humanity is a beautiful, complex, confusing thing. I wish
more people would remember that.
