David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

culture

Mom of out-of-control teen thug must share blame for ugly arrest

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The headlines made it sound like another ugly case of police brutality. CNN said, “Video shows Florida officer hitting 14-year-old twice during arrest.” The Miami television station which first reported the news said, “Mother, attorney of teen punched by Coral Springs officer at mall speak out.”

The video shows a male and a female officer with a teen on the ground. The male officer hits the girl in her side as she is held on the ground. My first instinct is to think it looks excessive. Why is he hitting her?

The girl’s mother is angry at police and quickly hired an attorney since she wants “justice to be served.”

And then I read about what led to that point shown in the video. What caused two police officers to be violently arresting a 14-year-old outside a shopping mall?

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How can I make sense of a world that’s fundamentally nonsensical?

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Her question was simple and innocent, but it sparked a sudden realization which seemed obvious moments later. But in that one moment of epiphany, I put a truth into words which my emotions had known all along.

“What would you say is the unifying theme of everything you think and create and do?” she asked.

Hannah called me a couple of weeks ago out of the blue. It’s easy to find my phone number if you know where to look. It’s even easier to find my email, so most strangers just send me email. But Hannah read some things I’d written and decided we needed to talk.

She had a lot of questions sparked by things I’ve written here. She said I suddenly made her question much of what she had been taught all her life by her conservative culture in suburban Salt Lake City. She wasn’t looking for rebellion. She was just looking for something true.

After a couple of days of intense conversation, she asked the question that struck me so strongly. It struck me strongly because it suddenly allowed me to see something obvious about myself.

Everything I do is a struggle to make sense of a world which is fundamentally nonsensical.

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My teen hijinks were silly fun, not alcohol-fueled drunken groping

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I try to imagine a Senate committee looking into my past and trying to find problematic episodes in my teen years that would disqualify me from holding a position of public trust. What would they find?

Well, they might find out about the time that my best friend and I had to sneak a coffin — an actual used casket — out of our church basement to sneak it back into a funeral home. We had borrowed the coffin for a Halloween horror house, but I lied about already having returned it. One thing led to another until Larry and I managed to sneak the coffin out of the church basement and into the funeral home without anybody seeing us. It was like something from a bad movie.

Or they might hear about the time I was trying to find a way into our high school on a weekend and the assistant principal caught me and threatened to call the police. But I talked him into calling the principal at home so that he could give me permission to go into the school — on the pretext of getting something from the newspaper office — so we escaped unharmed. Instead of getting to call the cops on us, the fuming assistant principal had to escort us inside and let us get what we wanted.

Or it’s even possible they’d hear about me trying to stuff myself into this mailbox on a church trip to North Carolina. In fact, they might hear a lot of silly or ridiculous stories. But they wouldn’t hear a single allegation of actual misconduct such as the ones that have started dribbling out about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Why? Were we better people than he and his friends were? Not at all. I simply ran in a culture of kids who didn’t use alcohol or other recreational drugs. We were sober and immature. They were drunk and immature.

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