I'm kind of pissed off. Andrew Sullivan just printed a letter I wrote (in part) and then wrote that I (with the others he printed) was going to lengths to excuse the witness in the Sandusky case.

Which I clearly was not. Unless he's just referring to the letter below mine, in which case, I'm confused.

Oo Allyson, that kind of thing happened to me before. As in, had a letter printed in Andrew Sullivan's blog in which he clearly sets up the letter by misreading or misunderstanding my intention. And then when you write to clarify his mistake? That letter he doesn't post.

Unless he's just referring to the letter below mine, in which case, I'm confused.

I think Andrew does that a lot--where he prints several letters and then responds to the last one.

eta: Oops, I just read his last comment. Yeah, he's talking about all the writers.

Yeah, I responded. My letter in full was:

Dear Andrew,

On the letter by the reader giving a possible reason for McQueary's terrible decision: please don't confuse a reason with an excuse. People walk away from the sounds of domestic violence in the apartment upstairs, a child in China bleeding in the street, Kitty Genovese...go all the way up the chain into the Holocaust. People turn away. Why? We call it simple cowardice. I'm willing to bet if you asked McQueary just moments before he saw this rape, if you asked him, "what would you do if you saw a child being tortured?" He'd likely respond the way most of us would, by saying that he'd do everything to stop it, he'd rescue the child. But when faced with this actual situation, he did nothing. Well, he told his dad. And then, over the years, he likely justified this action in his mind, that he did do something. He did tell an authority, he probably reasons.

It isn't a good reason. It certainly isn't an excuse. We, outside of that locker room would all say the same thing: we would rescue that child. We absolutely would. But then there's Kitty. And the child bleeding to death on a street in China. And certainly there are the thousands of rapes of children in the Congo happening right now. People turn away. There's no excuse. But until we find out what the reasons are that people turn away, how can we ensure that next time, they won't? Given the (deserved) shaming of McQueary, how do we ensure that the next person tells someone, anyone at all, instead of just turning away and telling no one?

We all, if asked in a comfortable setting, sipping a coffee and eating a gluten-free vanilla scone, will say without reservation that we would absolutely save that child. I bet McQueary thought so too, until he didn't. I need to know how he reasoned it, how he lived with it, how he justified it, so that we can hopefully provide people with better fucking reasoning skills.

I wish I knew what it is inside of a firefighter that allows him or her to run into a burning building, risking his/her own death to save strangers. Or a random good samaritan to pull over on a freeway to help someone change a flat tire while hundreds of other cars whiz by. What are their reasons? For those who drive by, they make a dozen justifications: the person has a cell phone, AAA is on the way, someone else will pull over, what if the person in the broken down car is dangerous?, I'll be late to pick up my kids from the sitter. For the firefighter, they usually downplay the sacrifice as "just being my job" or "anyone would have done the same." But those aren't really good reasons, either, because there are so many millions of examples of people who draw the blinds, cover their ears, justify walking away, or stepping over a child dying in a street. What makes the firefighter run into the burning building? What makes the coach turn away? How can we make more firefighters? In order to get there, we need to know how people like McQueary reasoned his actions and inactions. How did he justify it in his mind? It might be stomach-churning to listen to the reasons, but the hard stuff usually is. We don't have to excuse it. But we do have to find a way to fix it. And we can't if we don't know why.

Start with why McQueary turned away, why a dozen people turn away, and then you get why a government turns away from a child being buried up to her neck and being stoned to death because she was raped. This happens incrementally, over time, one justification at a time. One McQueary at a time. I'm not sure if we can truly know if we're the firefighter or the coach until we're tested. But I swear to you, here in the safety and comfort of my office, that I'd be a firefighter. No one would ever believe in a million years that they'd be the coach. And yet, here we are.

I don't understand the Andrew Sullivan post, Allyson. A reader that's not paying attention might misread your letter, but surely not the one from the person who married at at 20. I don't get how those letters can all be lumped into one category.

I think the difference between the coach and the firefighter is training. I hope one of the upsides of this whole Penn State mess is that more people think through in advance what they would do so that, when/if they are in that situation, they can follow through by acting on what they have already thought through.

I once had someone I barely knew text me that her boyfriend had assaulted her the night before and almost smothered their baby. Despite the really clear text, it took me several hours to realize that I should call the police. But I did eventually call the police and told them what I knew.

Yeah, those letters don't go together under the oversimplified heading of "dissent." I'm not sure why he's trying to wrap them all up that way.

I mean, I'm CLEARLY not excusing what he did. CLEARLY.

Maybe he's in a place that where he's a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday ChiKat!