See Something/Say Something

Fixing the men who thought being 7th in line for a gang rape would be fun is something best left to others.  I cannot imagine their home lives, the parenting they received, the friends they chose.  There's a lack of decency there that I can't remember being around, anywhere, any time.  

I've been scrutinizing my past.  I'm wondering if there were signs I overlooked, signals I missed.  Was the neighborhood's naughty boy reacting to his closeted older brother or his cold and forbidding parents?  What did he grow up to be?

The houses on our street were built all at once and inhabited all at once by young families with small children.  We grew up together, playing across our front and back yards, waiting at the bus stop, sledding down the steepest driveway (ours).  Within that group there was no bullying, no feuding, no harassment... or was it there and I just didn't notice?

I'd never been warned to look.  My parents protected us from driving with the Holocaust survivor who drank too much; he was fun to be around, but always with another grown up there, too.  He was never a threat, though.  I don't remember being afraid.  

When I went off to one of the first coed dorms in the country, G'ma was only upset that the girls' rooms were on the first floor.  She wasn't worried about my safety within the building, she feared outside intruders.  

Two of the punished students are still on the Cornell campus.  I'm not sure G'ma would be happy knowing that.  Just like not wanting to share a locker room with Deshaun Watson, I don't want to have to listen to that person ask a question in class.  Thinking about it makes my skin crawl.  This is not a person I want to know.

Once again, I come back to the men who received the Snapchat invitation to a rape.  TBG cannot imagine receiving such a message from one of his fraternity brothers; that's not who we were.  He won't even help me conjure up a response, it disgusts him so.  

When I read that the party monitor was involved in the assault, I wondered where a concerned citizen might have turned.  I was mulling this when I heard from an old friend, the son of old friends, reporting on a situation Little Cuter called me about last week.  Something hadn't feel right to her.  She wondered if I noticed it.  I reached out - the loop is closed, information is shared, and we all feel the love.

It didn't take anything more than a feeling for her to act.

Didn't one man on the receiving end of that Snapchat message have an inkling that this wasn't good?  Didn't it feel yukky to any of them?  Didn't one of them have someone to call?

It's more than the violence and the institutional failures.  It's about how we are raising our boys.  50 of them received a message about a rape.  It went on for hours after it was sent.  Snapchat messages may disappear, their failure to act lives on.