I just remembered an incident from my college days relevant to some of the things going on now. One of my friends, a young woman (not a girlfriend—a friend who was a girl) approached me and told me she was being sexually harassed by one of her professors and she didn’t know what to do about it. The professor was a very prominent figure, one of the university’s leading lights.
I recruited a mutual friend of ours and the two of us went to the prof’s apartment to have a talk with him. Without mentioning names we told him in no uncertain terms that his attentions towards his female students were not appreciated, he should cut it out, and that we could make life very miserable for him if he didn’t behave himself. He did and the incident was over. It probably helped that neither of us was in the department in which he taught, IIRC not even in the same school of the university.
I’m not sure what the moral of that story is if any. My wife says it’s that it takes a village. I think that it’s that there are a lot of gutless people out there these days. I didn’t have the impression that my friend’s and my behavior was particularly exceptional at the time—just the thing that a decent person would do.
I don’t have so much the sense of gutless as they don’t care.
Steve
I celebrate the few who sit down or kneel against the superstition-infused Pledge of Allegiance, National Anthem, Decalogue, Cross or Moment of Silence.