Behaving decently

I've read a lot of the commentaries and articles dealing with Brett Kavanaugh--whether he lied or didn't, what he lied about, his indignation and self-righteous anger on the stand, and so on. Personally I just don't trust him, since he appears to have lied about words like boofing and devil's triangle, among others (both of which have clear sexual connotations). He wants to make us believe that he was a decent young man with only the best motives where women were concerned. I don't believe that he was so decent. Any time massive amounts of alcohol are involved in order to have a 'good time', a decent mindset and decent behavior go out the window. It's guaranteed that something will go wrong or someone will get hurt. During my teenage years, young men drove when they were drunk, and ended up hurting (or killing) themselves and often others. One young man, quarterback of his high school football team, ended up a paraplegic after a horrific car crash that killed another occupant in the car. And so on. Driving drunk was not unusual then, but that changed dramatically when I reached my mid-twenties and MADD (Mothers against drunk driving--see https://www.madd.org/about-us/our-story/ for more info) forced the drinking age laws to change.

Society often says 'boys will be boys' whenever their 'bad' behavior is brought up, whether that bad behavior is sexual, alcohol-related, or drug-related. We let teenage boys off the hook when we use that expression, as though they somehow deserve to be excused for their bad behavior. They don't, and neither do the teenage girls who behave similarly. Unfortunately, it's often teenage girls who end up getting hurt more often than teenage boys, especially if sexual assault/rape enters the picture.

I know that it's possible that men and women can change, so I won't argue that point. I went to school with male and female bullies, most of whom grew up and became well-functioning, non-bullying adults. But nevertheless, they were not very nice persons when we were growing up. Their behavior was not excused however in my day; it was clamped down upon by parents and schools. All forms of sexual harassment and abuse should also be clamped down upon--by parents, schools and workplaces--whenever it appears. We don't need a lot of new regulations and laws; they exist already. We need to have them enforced; we need to enforce them. The abusers and harassers should be punished. Rapists should go to prison for a minimum of twenty years. They should not be rewarded with cushy positions and a 'get out of jail free' card whenever they've done something wrong. Angry privileged white men defend each other and protect each other. They let each other get away with bad behavior. They call in favors, they make deals, they pay off those they've abused/raped, and they get away with it. They are above the law and are allowed to remain there. They whine about the impact of hearings and investigations on their families; but they never once stop to consider the impact of their sexual assaults/rapes on the women they assault/rape, and on the families of those women. The narcissism, selfishness, and sociopathic tendencies in these men are appalling. Sociopaths are defined by behavior that is antisocial and often criminal; they lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. That pretty much sums up the behavior of many of the male politicians in government these days, as well as many of the men in the entertainment business and in the business world generally. It seems to me that many men simply hate women, and I really don't understand why. How we got to this point, I don't know.

I leave you with an excellent opinion article--Decent Men Don't Do These Things--published in The New York Times on September 24th: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/opinion/kavanaugh-sexual-assault-blasey-testimony.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

It's food for thought. I believe we need a national movement (like MADD) that stresses the urgency of learning how to behave decently again. We could hope our current president embraced such a movement and learned something from it as well.