VI
Cruelty may begin with submission freely given because a person wants to belong to a group because that group represents an idea he supports or an identity he wishes to take on or because doing so will provide him with advancement in the world. A Nazi does not have to be a fanatic. He can do his or her work in a desultory fashion, buried within a bureaucracy, while enjoying the pay and the status being a Party member gives him. He will sign the death sentences, review the plans for extermination, make the trains run on time because he has bills to pay.
Stripped of his uniform and power, on trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt found Adolf Eichman to be “banal”, a man given to stock phrases, devoid of originality. She said he had developed “a resistance to thinking.”** Ordinary people, people even normally polite and kind in their personal lives, can do terrible things while burrowed within a bureaucratic structure. This is one way, maybe the most effective way by which “people overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.”*
VII
Still, we are individuals within groups. We formulate thoughts that no one else can see. We might be drawn along on the tide of emotion and in the thrall of group action to hurt another, but we also might walk away from such actions. The vast majority of us possess a conscience. How do so many overcome that voice that says” this is wrong, and I must not do it”? How do some refuse to obey group pressure and keep their integrity and conscience and honor intact?
The My Lai massacre occurred in March of 1968. A Company of American soldiers was sent out to this patch of country to try to stop guerilla attacks. In their search of the villages, they found no guerillas. Still, a Colonel ordered his officers to go into the area “and wipe them out for good.” Between 350- and 500-men women and children were shot to death, some of them machine-gunned in a ditch. Women were mass raped. This was learned savagery. An order by a superior officer was given that unleashed wanton brutality and mass murder.
At the time of that rampage and in the midst of that carnage, “Chief Warrant Officer Thompson and his two crewmen were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when they spotted the bodies of men, women and children strewn over the landscape.
Mr. Thompson landed twice in an effort to determine what was happening, finally coming to the realization that a massacre was taking place. The second time, he touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Mr. Thompson persuaded the Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did.
Mr. Thompson radioed for a helicopter gunship to evacuate the group, and then his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, pulled a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch, and their helicopter flew him to safety.
Mr. Thompson told of what he had seen when he returned to his base.
“They said I was screaming quite loud,” he told U.S. News & World Report in 2004. “I threatened never to fly again. I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.”##
VIII
Several of us were on afternoon bus duty in the parking lots between the Middle and High School, an assignment somewhere between refereeing a rugby match and acting like border collies and shepherding adolescents onto their buses quickly.
The process unrolled smoothly, as it did most days, and the vice principal and I were talking and slowly walking back to the HS when his flip phone tweeted. A bus was returning. There had been a fight.
We boarded the bus when it returned and removed 3 boys and 1 girl. Two of the boys, juniors, one of them with blood around his nose and mouth, kids often on the edge of trouble in school, were faux-defiant, that stage of teenage bravado better known as ‘I screwed up but I’m gonna fake my way out’. The other boy, a sophomore I had in class, broad shouldered, polite, quiet but not shy. I’ll call him Tim. The girl was barely holding back tears, and she stuck by Tim’s side as we walked back inside.
The juniors chattered the usual ‘we didn’t do anything it was him he came after us’ line. Tim and the girl said nothing.
We separated the juniors and spoke with them first. Their stories did not match up.
The girl told us they had been picking on her for several days now – name calling that had begun to escalate. Today they had shoulder bumped her in the hallway and laughed when her books fell from her hands.
They came after her on the bus. Standing over her first and then sitting behind her and poking the back of her seat, then touching her hair, all the while calling her names.
Tim was sitting several seats behind them. He got up and walked forward and told them to leave her alone. They stood, only one of them able to confront Tim because of the narrowness of the aisle. They told him to ‘f-off’, etc. Tim did not move. He told them again to leave her alone.
The junior closest to Tim took a step forward and extended his arms to push Tim. All of this happened very fast. Tim punched him in the face and knocked him back into his friend. The junior, temporarily shocked, paused and then rushed Tim again. Tim punched him in the face, again.
By this time the bus driver was screaming “Sit Down!! Sit Down”, the rest of the kids were screaming, the girl was screaming.
Everyone sat down. The bus returned to the loading area.
The HS had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to fighting. The juniors were suspended because they had also been bullying the girl.
When we spoke with Tim, he was nervous, afraid he was in deep trouble.
We listened to his story. It matched up to the girl’s story. He denied nothing. He told us he punched the one bully in the face, twice. He did not know the girl. She was not his friend. He told us that he did not like what they were doing and that, finally, he couldn’t just sit there and watch it. So … he got up.
His parents were proud of him. We were proud of him although more circumspect. He received one detention for fighting, but once word spread among the faculty, he became one of those students everyone admires and looks out for.
**from Eichman in Jerusalem.
*from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
