The Hanging Judge, Part 2

This essay follows my prior blog entry, The Hanging Judge in the Court of Public Opinion

The photo that started it all: Nick Sandmann and Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial

Let’s start with an uncomfortable confession. I’ve never set this confession in writing, because whenever I’ve spoken it aloud, hearers have responded with shock and outrage. It makes me uncomfortable inscribing it for posterity, knowing it might, someday, get taken out of context and used against me. But here goes:

Back in high school, I used to flash the Nazi salute for laughs.

Not once or twice, either. I did it frequently during the summer between my junior and senior years. It even carried over into my senior year somewhat. In my significantly white suburb, I thought I was being dark, edgy, and ironic, doing something so patently absurd that, obviously, anyone could see I meant almost the exact opposite from what that signal originally meant.

Then, during my senior year, a trusted adult took me aside. He explained, in conversational tones, that I didn’t come across as ironic or grimly humorous; I came across as a dickhead, and I was probably attracting the attention of people whose friendship and support I probably didn’t want. He didn’t scold me or dress me down. He just explained how I appeared to others, in a calm, dispassionate way.

I can’t help remembering that experience this week, as the flame-out about the Covington Catholic boys and their confrontation with Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips continues. I’ve seen adults, teachers even, demanding the iron fist of law come after these boys. I’ve seen demands for righteous payback. I’ve watched grown women and men reduced to screaming.

And I’ve wondered: what if adults had treated me that way at that age?

Let’s be clear. Those boys behaved reprehensibly. No matter who started their confrontation with Mr. Phillips (and video shows it wasn’t them), they certainly escalated it. Their behavior, including shouted war whoops and “tomahawk chops,” shows not only that they had racist thoughts in their heads already, but that they’d had time-honored racist tropes modeled for them by adults. Plus, red hats, dammit. Red hats.

So I’m not making excuses for them. Rather, I believe we need to evaluate whether our response guides children out of error, or causes them to defensively retrench their behavior and set their attitudes for life. I think you can guess which side I fall on.

Children, by definition, cannot govern their responses. Whether this means their emotional reactions to minor stresses, as when they collapse into rage or tears after a difficult test; or the way they retaliate when confronted, kids do this because they don’t know any other way. Because they’re children, and self-restraint, decorum, and equanimity are learned over time. Which children haven’t had.

In obvious terms, this reflects the fact that children are young. But it also reflects a neuroscience reality: human beings are born without fully functioning brains. Let me get pointy-headed a moment. At birth, humans have a brain stem and amygdala, so we’re born capable of fear and anger. But we’re born without a cerebral cortex, meaning we’re born incapable of reason, restraint, and self-control.

Let’s go further. Most people’s cerebral cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25. Even more important, the anterior cingulate, which governs the relationship between the cortex and the amygdala, isn’t developed until around age 30. And how these two sub-organs develop depends heavily on live exposures.

A childhood of fear, anger, and retribution causes a larger amygdala. And a larger amygdala tracks positively with addiction, domestic abuse, and racism. (Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course, but the correlation is strong.) A childhood of nurturance, guidance, and justice causes a larger cortex and anterior cingulate. That tracks with composure, restraint, and yes, anti-racism.

The calls for payback against the Covington Catholic boys are chilling. One I’ve seen even said it’s okay to punitively wallop these boys because of family separations at the border. Really? As a Christian, I believe only Jesus can bear the guilt of others’ crimes. Punishing these kids because the President their parents voted for did something shitty, will reinforce attitudes of fear and hatred I suspect they already have.

If we don't break the pattern, this may be what we see when these boys grow up

Demands for eye-for-an-eye retribution don’t fix the underlying problem. These boys, with their undeveloped brains, did something hasty and revolting. We, the adults around them, have a responsibility to teach them better, as one adult did for me. Instead, we’re reinforcing the patterns that probably created their bigoted behavior to begin with. We’re doubling down on the hatred that warps their future.

And someday, we’ll all have to pay for what we’re doing right now.