Care to direct us to the Youtube video of you running naked across a football field and the ensuing arrest?
While off topic, would you be supportive of an individual walking along a sidewalk who suddenly drops his pants and exposes himself in front of your eight year old daughter waiting for her school bus?
No, as I said, I don’t support it. As a matter of fact, I expressly said the opposite.
The point is, people are stupid. We all have our moments. We are people, after all. We can strive to be better, and not be satisfied with a lower standard. But none of us is perfect, so we have to constantly strive.
And we learn our lessons.
If we’re lucky.
Some of us aren’t so lucky. So many of us die young, and not through the violence of others, but due to our own fallibility. In this we are fortunate, most of us haven’t had to live through times where the less quick people are culled. Most of us haven’t died in wars. We’ve been lucky.
The point is, the older you get, the more things you live through, you are less likely to succumb to those things that kill younger men. Car crashes at high speed are the domain of the young, as are many other traumatic deaths they suffer.
But when you are 15, there is so much you don’t know, and you often don’t possess enough commonsense to compensate for it.
So you make mistakes.
Like running across a field stark naked in front of thousands of people.
At 15, you haven’t seen the bad turns that things can take, and you don’t understand all the ramifications of things. You learn. When I was 12, living in the Philippines, I went snorkeling with my brothers over a good sized reef, Grande Island near Subic Bay. When we went out, it was sunny and the water was pretty calm. As we swam six feet over the tops of the dinner table-sized coral reef heads at high tide, it was idyllic. Canyons of colorful coral below us. We swam probably 200 yards out, we weren’t paying attention, and weather moved in.
To make it worse, the tide had been going out. Next thing I knew, we were trying to swim back to shore, and the rough water made it so you were in constant danger of being dashed on the coral that was just a foot or two below. My brother must have gotten stranded by low water over a large area of coral, and he stood up on the coral. He was on the edge, and it gave way. The backs of both of his legs were bleeding from large scratches and gouges that happened when he slid against the broken coral edges as he plummeted in.
We survived, and that lesson has served me well my entire life. I keep a closer eye on the weather around me, especially when I am on the water. But a lot of people don’t survive to learn that lesson. And that is just one thing.
What this kid who streaked across that football field didn’t get a chance to learn was how to manage himself. Perhaps it was the lack of a role model to teach him self-control. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to learn that actions often have ramifications. And he didn’t have the experience to consider whether he was prepared to accept those ramifications. Sometimes there just isn’t any commonsense to pitch in and help that 15 year old boy figure things out.
And when the deed is done, and the reality of what has transpired sinks in, if the person hasn’t had the experience or commonsense to avoid doing that thing, it is a complete surprise to that 15 year old boy. I would think that could be pretty disorienting to some 15 year old boys. It could be a lot to take in at once.
Why should this kid have even be threatened to be put on a sex offender list is nearly incomprehensible to me. A fifteen year old with that stigma might well think his life is ruined forever. As you get older, you understand that type of thing may NOT actually be fatal, but can even open a pathway for you (Think of an alcoholic who survives hitting rock bottom and turns his life around)
You can see something that is at first blush so terrible, there is no way you can go on, but after you have survived it, you may consider it the single most valuable and important thing that ever happened to you in your life, and would have nothing you would trade it for.
This 15 year old hadn’t lived long enough to to recognize that incredible fact, that your stupidity may actually open a door for you that shapes who you will become. And that it can be a positive thing in the end.
But that is what I think happened to this 15 year old kid. It saddens me.