Disgraced former congressman Mark Foley is in rehab. He says he’s an alcoholic. He says he was molested as a teen by a clergyman. His lawyer said that Foley also wanted to acknowledge for the first time that he is gay.
Charles Roberts IV is dead. He killed himself after shooting 10 girls in a Pennsylvania school. One suicide note said he was “filled with so much hate.” He expressed deep sadness over the death of his firstborn child, a daughter named Elise, in 1997.
Does any of that matter? Does any of it provide a shred of exculpatory evidence, as the lawyers would say? A glimmer of understanding? Or does this litany of trauma and travail just seem like the same stale list of excuses that wrongdoers of every stripe trot out to explain their crimes and misdemeanors?
We’re not psychiatrists or lawyers, and we’re not comparing what Foley did with what Roberts did. The two stories have shared space in the newspapers, if little else.
In a court or a doctor’s office, the reasons someone did something wrong can be crucial–to understanding, to punishment, to trying to prevent such things from happening again. Ultimately, however, the quest to learn the why behind the wrongdoing is often as satisfying and illuminating as the old Flip Wilson line: “The devil made me do it.”
In Foley’s case, for instance, there was the claim of alcoholism after the revelation of explicit instant messages he sent to a teenage former page. That provoked some skepticism among friends and acquaintances who said they rarely saw him drink. A former colleague, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), said on Fox News Channel: “I don’t buy this at all. I think this is a phony defense. The fact is, I think he’s responsible for what he did here and I think it’s a gimmick.”
It’s refreshing when people take responsibility without a fusillade of rationalizations. Take the case of Tennessee Titans defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth. He was suspended without pay for five games last week for kicking Dallas Cowboys guard Andre Gurode in the face while Gurode was on the ground without his helmet.
After the incident, Haynesworth said: “What I did out there was disgusting. I just lost control for a second. It’s an emotional game out there, but that should never happen. I feel like I disgraced the game, disgraced my team and disgraced my last name.”
Precisely. No excuses, no claim to being a victim of something or someone.
The world is a giant and confusing laboratory of cause and effect, as complex as the weather and just as impossible to control. Scientists and psychologists struggle to understand human behavior. New technology provides insight into how the brain reacts, peering into the process of thinking itself.
People want to know why something happens so they can reassure themselves that it can never happen to them or their families. They–we–seek to make sense of the senseless, but that is a chimera.
Terrible things happen. They happen to good people and to bad people. They happen for reasons that are innumerable, and they happen for reasons that are not apparent to mortals.
There are reasons. There are no excuses.
