The Death of Shame

I, more than most, am repeatedly reminded of the depravity this generation is laced with. As much as I try to stay away from categorical railings against society at large, I've noticed a pattern in the attitudes and behaviors I see in people - not just the ones I have to mess with, but ones I hear and read about in other places. In my opinion, people aren't engaging in mischief and mayhem because the world is becoming inherently more evil...I think it has to do with the apparent death of shame in our society.

From time immemorial, shame has been the great check and balance that has guided behaviors within societies. In ancient cultures, family was paramount, and to willfully transgress a relationship with God or man meant bringing shame upon your family. This dynamic obviously doesn't come into play much any more. For one, "family" has so many meanings that it means nothing. Not when I see more love in foster homes than within nuclear families sometimes. Not when probably 85% of the calls I work involving 'families' include only one parent.

The single parent aspect is of extreme importance. This is a daily observance for me, and it's more subversive than we give it credit for. Most people, when they think of the concept of divorce within families with children, picture a season of trauma followed by a slow but steady process of healing. This may be true in some cases, but it's not what I'm seeing. More often what I'm seeing looks something like this:

Two people who have what should be obvious incongruities and incompatibilities marry anyway and then, for some reason or another, choose to have children. Perhaps they don't give themselves time to settle into their married lives; maybe they don't see themselves for who they are as a couple; possibly they think that a child will magically fix what is broken within their marriage. Whatever the reason, a dependent entity is created.

At some point after this, the fissures begin to turn into chasms. Perhaps once settled they realize they cannot function connected to the other; maybe something makes them realize who they really are; possibly they look up from changing a diaper or packing a lunchbox and realize that falling in love with their child hasn't caused them to fall in love with their spouse.

And so they destroy their bond of promise and go their separate ways, with great financial and emotional cost. Or, increasingly, because they are already financially strapped they have no choice but to co-exist in a venomous environment, remaining married only because their checkbook holds them at knifepoint. This obviously provides a horrifying paradigm of domestic life for any children pattering around the house.

Either way, from that point forward, their children no longer have a unified entity known as 'parents' but rather separate entities known as 'my mom' and 'my dad.' I'm going to my mom's house; I'll be at my dad's this weekend. And, as a seeming rite of passage, each usually seeks to mollify the trauma by gift-giving or, more insidiously, a softened disposition toward discipline. Thus come the choruses of "Mom always lets me do this" and "Dad gives that to me all the time."

This is a killer on two fronts. First, mom and dad usually don't understand that love does not mean acceptance and tolerance. Love for them seems to be sheltering Junior from the impact of reality. Second, Junior, especially if a teenager, gets a new nuclear weapon called volitional residency. Translation? "Oh, yeah? Well maybe I'll just live with Dad/Mom." The fruits of both sides are awful.

They're what produce the teenagers I'm seeing on the street. The seventeen year old girl with over two thousand dollars in cash in her purse and no clue about how to start a savings account because mom owns a business and "takes care of that stuff." The fifteen year old who didn't just sneak a random beer, but shoplifted a bottle of liquor, drank the whole thing, then stumbled drunk across five lanes of traffic while cars dodged him. The fourteen year old girl who sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes at me when I suggested that she was in the wrong for, you know, stealing things.

I harp on the teenagers. But they're just the poster children. Their parents don't have any shame, either. No shame in lying. No shame in drunkenness. No shame in infidelity. No shame in acid tongues and erupting tempers. Why? Because shame requires that the one shamed be in the minority. To be a sore thumb among their peers, someone to look upon with pity and disdain. The problem today is that lying, drunkenness, infidelity, and anger are, in a wealth of circles, normal behavior.

Many of us think 'normal' relates to some standard, but we forget that normalcy is subjective, and requires only that 51% of a group exhibit the trait. If most people lie, is there really any shame in lying? Who is left to judge? The odd people are suddenly the ones naively telling the truth. They are the ones scorned and laughed at and pressured to conform to the group's collective behavior. And since the human heart yearns to be accepted, this is all too often what ends up happening.

So what's my grand, sweeping solution this time? Well, I guess it's just being weird. If 51% of people are doing something wrong, it suddenly becomes normal, but it doesn't become right. Distill truth from chaos and drink deeply from its depths. Figure out who you are and anchor yourself there - for it would be sorrowful indeed to look back at your life and realize that in trying to live by others' lamplight, you became a thousand things to a thousand people - but you were never you.

In the end, if you whore your integrity out to the whims of others, shame will live.

But you will die.