|
My 10-year-old daughter Caitlin attends a privately run after school program. It’s really more of a babysitting service, but it is convenient, inexpensive, and the young woman who runs it is sweet, capable, and obviously cares for the kids.
Yes, this is going somewhere. Bear with me, fellow DUers; I have a point to make.
Last Friday, school was closed for parent conferences and Caitlin chose to spend the day at the center rather than join me at work (she knows I will actually give her work to do). Daniella (the center’s owner) asked me if I minded whether she gave Caitlin some schoolwork/busywork to do. I said sure. When I picked Caitlin up at the end of the day, Daniella told me that Caitlin had flatly refused to do the work and had acted sullen and uncooperative all day.
This is not a fresh kid. People usually compliment me on my daughter’s extraordinary manners. For the sake of argument, please believe me when I tell you that I believe in leading by example; I try to be polite to everyone at all times. It’s sometimes through clenched teeth, but I do try. When I got Caitlin home, I said, “You should be ashamed of the way you behaved today. That is not how you were taught to treat people.” An apology was elicited; a note written, and I hope a lesson learned.
Then I thought about my language. Those of us, myself among them, who grew up in repressively religious milieus (think: Buggy in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—that was my mother) learned a lot about shame at an early age. I would go so far as to say many young lives were shaped by shame. I have been determined not to repeat my parents’ mistakes with my own daughter. Life is celebration, not contrition.
Still, what place shame? Have we, in our zeal to overcome the sins of our parents, given shame the short shrift? I look at my daughter, who is accepting of her body (good!), proud of her achievements (good!), and generally thinks she’s “all that.” (good?). I look at my stepson (who does not live with us), who has no qualms about his unhealthy obesity (good?), poor academic performance (good?), and predilection for online porn (good?). Both he and my daughter appear blithely oblivious to their own shortcomings, and are genuinely surprised when parents and teachers express disappointment in substandard behavior. “Shame” is not part of their vocabulary. Have we gone too far in the other direction? You will note that I make a sharp distinction between acceptance of self and acceptance of behavior. How to detach the behavior from the persona?
Does shame deserve another chance? Can shame motivate us to improve ourselves? Is shame a warning light that should go off in our heads when we’ve crossed the line or fallen short of the mark?
Fast forward six days. I learn about President Bush’s slide show antics and his tasteless jokes about WMDs. The first words out of my mouth are, “He should be ashamed of himself. They all should.” And I stand by that assertion. Where’s the shame?
It’s not the same thing as “where’s the outrage?” Outrage is outwardly focused, a reaction. Shame is internal. It’s a mechanism that should kick in like M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch Dis.” It should be our moral fail-safe point. More than anything else, Bush’s puerile frat-boy jokes throw the moral bankruptcy of his entire ideology into sharp relief.
Our reaction should be outrage. But it never should have happened in the first place, because he should be ashamed.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
