My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #4, July 25, 1997

LEARNING TO BE PLAID

I gave a talk on books for young adults not too long ago, and began by talking about some of the developmental tasks teenagers have to accomplish before they can move into the adult world. One of those, it seems to me, is learning plaidness. As in Dorothy Parker's wonderful little verse,

When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
"Come out, you dogs, and fight," said I,
And wept there was but once to die
...
But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid...
"The Veteran."

Surely one of the more irritating hallmarks of adolescence is certainty. To kids, things are black or white, clearly right or clearly wrong, just or unjust. At sixteen, most of us are Holden Caulfield, seeing nothing but phoniness in the grownup world. We see through our parents' "Do as I say, not as I do." If they taught us to believe "thou shalt not kill," we upbraid them for tolerating war. If they raised us to hold promises sacred, we point out smugly that they are on their second or third marriages.

There is something to be said for that sort of righteousness and idealism. Combined with the limitless energy of teenagers, it can lead them to build housing for the homeless, clean up parks and playgrounds, fill sandbags against a raging river, gather food for the hungry, work without pay for politicians they hope will be better than the ones they despair of.

But it's no way to go through life, because we are none of us perfect or even perfectable. If we are unable to understand and forgive our parents for their errors, let alone the rest of the world, we will be unable to forgive ourselves for our own errors either. And that way lies madness.

Perhaps it's some kind of failure of imagination, an inability to see yourself inside someone else's skin, making his choices from the only alternatives he is capable of seeing. I saw that during VietNam, when the men I loved made one choice--to resist the draft and the war--and other men went off to fight. When the soldiers returned, many of the draft resisters spat on them, hurling words like "baby-killers" at them.

I hated that even then, and moreso now that I have some sense of what it was like for these teenage boys to be cast so suddenly into a morally ambiguous world where enemies and allies looked alike, and you learned the hard way that little children could throw grenades; where the officers you had been taught to blindly obey told you to do stupid or chilling things; where the drugs you had been taught to hate were sometimes the only available comfort and escape. And where loyalty to, and love for, the men who shared your day- to- day pain became a far more driving force than any of the rules you learned in Sunday School.

I hate it that Lt. Calley ordered his men to destroy a village and murder its women and children; I hate it that his men obeyed. I would hope that, were I in his platoon, I would have disobeyed orders. But I also know I might not have, because it would have meant betraying my friends as well as my commander.

When we stand on the sidelines, condemning after the fact, we are assuming that moral decisions are easy, that there is always a clear and obvious right thing to do, and that there is time to think about the decisions and their possible consequences. When all this is the case, yes, our decisions should be careful, they should be right, and we should be judged for them.

But mostly, life muddies things up. Sometimes the right choice isn't obvious--we simply don't know enough about what's going on. Often we have to make our choices quickly--either we stop on the road right then to offer assistance to a bruised and bloody stranger on the road, or we refuse to risk getting involved and drive on. Sometimes the right choice means risking danger, like standing up to the bully everyone else is afraid to cross. Sometimes it means going against your friends, who are doing something stupid, or wrong, or dangerous, like driving drunk or stoned. Sometimes it means becoming an outcast, like the white southerners who stood up for civil rights in the fifties and sixties.

And sometimes, even when we're right, we might not like the consequences.

There was a time when I pushed my way into the life of a horribly isolated, damaged young man. I made him pay attention to me and care for me, as I cared for him--the first one in his life to do so. I didn't know I was making him need me. I realized, too late, that he wouldn't let me have anything else in my life but him, not friends, not family, not a chance to find out who I was and what I could become. So I told him no, I wouldn't marry him. And one bright, sunny day, he drove his car sixty miles an hour into a concrete barrier. No skid marks.

I think about him a lot. Never comfortably. (This is a story hardly anyone knows about me, and I can't tell you how much I didn't want to tell it here, in such a public place. But since I am inviting you to revisit the dark corners where you have stashed your own if-onlys and should-I-haves, it would be dishonest and ungenerous not to show you my own, the scab I keep picking at and reopening. I still don't think I would choose differently, but...)

When we reflect upon the choices we made, and the choices we should have made, we maybe come to understand, and even forgive, ourselves. It makes us a little less hasty in judging other people's choices. We become plaid.

Does this mean we are obligated to understand and forgive Ted Bundy, or Timothy McVeigh or Adolf Eichmann? I don't think so, because I don't think we can. Their crimes are too extreme, too pure and uncomplicated in their evil. At some point, all of us will have our limits, our "this far and no farther."

But if we can't forgive normal human failings and weaknesses, we are doomed to be forever arrogant, forever stunted, forever sixteen.

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