In the fast-moving matter of Christine Blasey Ford v. Brett
Kavanaugh in the courtroom of public opinion … For the benefit of our
exhausted, battered country, may I suggest that it would behoove us all to
inhale a deep breath, take a big step back, and all get down off of our
respective soap boxes on the opinionated sidelines of this divide. Our
knee-jerk instinct is either: pronouncing Judge Kavanaugh guilty of being a
dangerously evil predator rapist while proclaiming the sainthood of Professor
Ford’s timely story; or conversely affirming Judge Kavanaugh to be a pillar of model
character while judging Professor Ford to be a seeker of headline publicity
regarding a decades-old fabricated story. Neither premature opinion is helpful
to anyone.
Currently, we are all spectators and speculators to this
controversy, at best. An objective and impartial investigation is clearly
needed. It should be expeditiously effected, but without artificial time deadlines
that would cast doubt on the perception of fairness, thereby tainting the Court
for years to come. A responsive process is hopefully being set up, ideally with
that rarest of things – bipartisan political support – guiding that effort
non-politically (versus the painful Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas politicized
confrontation of 1991). We need to give such a process a chance to work, and
let the details of these conflicting stories be sorted out one step at a time,
without prejudice. And then we can draw our conclusions when and as appropriate,
such conclusions likely to be difficult to come by. That is (or used to be) the
American Way.
And to the men seeking to engage in this conversation, I
urge particular caution. In my blog essay “Perspective on Sexual Assault”
(“www.ThoughtFromTheMountain.blogspot.com” dated 10/15/2016), I talked about
how we males have minimal comprehension or comparative insight on this topic as
it lives endlessly in a woman’s world. Few of us ever experience a sexual
assault; few carry the lifetime wounds, isolation and powerlessness that arise
from such events; few have to continually live within necessary and forced
boundaries of conduct for one’s physical and mental protection. So we would do
better to avoid more stupid comments about what we would have done, or what any
woman should have done, in such instances. These situations are barely on our
radar, or life experience, for understanding.
It should come as no surprise that a process that started
from a fully political basis should now be ending as a painfully political
exercise.
© 2018
Randy Bell www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com
