The following part of this memory was told to me by my ex sister-in-law:
My oldest nephew, who I think was in middle school at the time, had been at a sleepover. The boys left during the night and somehow made their way to a neighbor’s barn. There, they discovered a motorcycle. Maybe they carefully planned what was to happen. Maybe they knew all along that there was a motorcycle in that barn. Maybe they schemed for a while about how they would take it for a spin. I don’t know, nor do I know how they managed to start the thing. But that’s exactly what they did. As my sweet sister-in-law told the story, my nephew was the one who did not want to take the motorcycle out of the barn. She said he knew it was wrong, so he sat alone in the dark at the end of the long driveway while his buddies went on their joy rides. Was he the lookout? I never asked him. I believed the story that filtered down to me from his mother a week after the fact. Her son was the good kid, waiting for his buddies to finish their mischief so he could go back home.
When the kids finished riding the motorcycle, they ditched it, hiding it near one of the corn fields. They covered it in cornstalks so it wouldn’t be seen. Later, the next day, they tried to disguise it further with some paint. Heavens, they had stolen their first vehicle, and they had no intention of giving it back. During their week of wheeled freedom, the kids drove around the darkened country roads late at night. My sister-in-law said that my nephew never drove the motorcycle. He knew it was wrong. He was the good kid of the bunch.
As you can guess, the culprits were caught. The owner of the motorcycle had reported the theft. Grand theft auto. A felony.
This is when I jumped into the story. There were plenty of tears. Could a motorcycle be considered an automobile? It only had two wheels. Didn’t that count for something? Could a childish joy ride really be Grand Theft? My nephew was only in middle school. Didn’t that count for something? And of course, he was innocent. We all knew that. It should count the most. Right? I immediately called my dear friend whose husband was a criminal attorney specializing in juvenile cases. I explained the whole story. I told her husband how much I loved my nephew. What a great kid he was. My friend listened and then said something that I have never forgotten. “Great kids don’t do that.” I protested. I said again what a great kid my nephew was. He explained with very little sympathy, that in the eyes of the law, because my nephew knew that a crime had been committed and had said nothing, he was just as guilty. Whether he touched the motorcycle or not, was beside the point. “But that’s being a rat,” I said. “That’s the law,” he said. “A good kid would have said something.”
…But we raise our children with excuses and denial. And, if you happen to be privileged and white, if you live in a posh part of town with enough money to hire the right attorney, your kids get off. Hell, I’m guilty of this too.
But tonight, the night that Montana voted to send a bully to Congress, a man who is in favor of rendering 142,000 of his constituents without healthcare, a man who doesn’t care that the gorgeous glaciers in his state are melting, a man who when asked a question from a journalist, assaulted him, all I can think of while I fight sleep, is that the people in Montana who voted for him are not good people. Good people wouldn’t vote that way. And the people who voted for and still support Donald Trump, the racist bully, who brags about sexually assaulting women and can’t speak a sentence without lying, are not good people either. Good people don’t support bullies, or racists or sexists. And if we make excuses for people like this, we aren’t the good guys either. By making excuses, we normalize that which is not right and that which is not good. One day, when Trump fulfills another one of his promises, to stand in the middle of Time Square and shoot someone, will the GOP make more excuses for him? Will the rest of us sit silently by and do nothing? Perhaps by that time it won’t matter. It’s possible that by that time, our freedom to say anything at all will be gone. Perhaps by that time, the very word “good” will have lost all its meaning.