Like many of you, I was dismayed when I learned of the scandal surrounding Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister of Canada.  No, I’m not talking about Melania’s celebrity crush, but rather the photos now resurfacing of him wearing Blackface.  And every time we hear a defense of “it was a harmless costume! a jest!  he was young! it’s in the past! it doesn’t matter!” another photo surfaces hinting that maybe it was a wee bit more than a jest and a one-off.   But we LIKE Trudeau — he’s handsome, he’s funny, he’s nice, he’s Canadian.  Then what about Brett Kavanaugh?  Based on his outbursts at the confirmation hearing, he seems less nice, less funny, less handsome, less Canadian — but he’s another guy in the public eye who maybe did a thing and went too far when he was young so does it matter?  Was it in jest?  Harmless?

No.

Sexual assault is never harmless.

Racism is never harmless.

You don’t get a pass because you are good looking or white or famous or in the popular group.

We all watched the Covington Catholic Boys scandal unfold in the media and we were all quick to judge and condemn the young man in the MAGA hat.  I was.  As a teacher, I have seen that smug expression on more than one arrogant, privileged, entitled punk.  Every teacher I know has.  There was something about the expression on his face that made my stomach churn — however, as a person who suffers from RBF, I am willing to accept that the kid is not the D-ick I think he looks like and perhaps that is just how he looks.  I was relieved after learning more about the story that the media was too quick to fire a shot and the student was not, in fact, harassing a Native American elder.  But then I heard about the RAPE comment and the BLACKFACE video and yearbook photos and realized that it isn’t just a Covington problem — it’s a cultural problem.

It’s time, folks.  It’s time to admit we have a sickness in America.  We make excuses for bad behavior.  We refuse to own our own bad behavior.  We make excuses for our young people behaving badly instead of teaching them why those behaviors are bad in the first place.  We blame the victims for our bad behavior.  We foster a school culture that encourages bad behavior. We take up a president’s call to action and debase it.  We weaponize and politicize our First Amendment Rights not to be heard, but to incite hatred and violence.

I know you can’t change the past and maybe some of us can be and should be forgiven for acts when we truly didn’t know better, but that only counts if we are committed to raising a better generation.  I would like to hear Trudeau say, “yes, I did this thing and it was wrong” without making excuses.  I would like to hear Kavanaugh say, “yes, I went too far and I am sorry” without making excuses.  I would like to hear Brock Turner say, “yes, I did this thing and it was terrible” without his mother making excuses.  I would like James Fields to say “yes, I did this thing and I am sorry” without making excuses for why he drove his car into a crowd of people.  I would like Patricia Catania to say “yes, I did this abhorrent thing” and LOSE HER JOB instead of the slap on the wrist she received.

A school principal has to say to students in blackface that it just isn’t ok to do that, regardless of the “theme” of the spirit week.  A school board has to stand up to a union and fire a teacher who abuses their position of power.  We have to teach our young men that it is not ok to joke about rape…and that’s not ok to rape.  Every college campus has programming and security protocols to teach young women how not to get raped…but we have nothing that tells our young men not to.  Let’s call mass shooters the sociopaths they are, without making excuses for their pasts or blaming the NRA (but also, a little bit of common sense here, gun industry, the system ain’t workin’. I can’t buy spray paint at Walmart without ID, but…).  Someone said to me recently that she felt bad for Michael Jackson because those mothers should never have allowed their children to visit Neverland in the first place (I agree that they should have called a halt to this nonsense when they learned that their young children were SHARING A BED WITH AN ADULT MAN, but the blame belongs on the assailant). In other words, it was their fault because they wanted their children to be famous.  Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, James Franco, Jeffrey Epstein….we blame the victims each and every time.  Across the country, teachers’ unions fight against the firing of teachers accused of racism, harassment, and sexual misconduct.  Sick.

But let’s also stop minimizing and normalizing this bad behavior.  We need to stop defending this bad behavior without making it about left/right politics.  Yes, he’s the President — but advocating to “grab ’em by the pussy” is BAD BEHAVIOR. Having sex with your blue-dress wearing intern in the White House is BAD BEHAVIOR. Manipulating underage girls under the guise of helping them with their careers is BAD BEHAVIOR. Telling (and believing!) your students that white people are genetically smarter is BAD BEHAVIOR.

Call it out, condemn it, then DEMAND BETTER.

When you know better, you do better.