Fifty Shades of Gray Blurred Lines

                I remember when I thought that being a grown-up was the most exciting thing in the world. Remember when you’d add a few months onto your age so you could tell people you were 13, instead of 12 and ¾? Remember when you thought that having your own house and your own car and your own children/free manual labor was the ultimate freedom, and you couldn’t grow up fast enough? Every time you’d tell a grown-up that you couldn’t wait to be older, they’d give you the clichéd “Don’t grow up too fast, kid. Someday you’ll wish you were younger." You thought, “Yeah well, you don’t even eat Oreos for breakfast every day like I will when I grow up, of course you hate being an adult”. To me, as a fiercely independent only child with loving but textbook-definition helicopter parents who packed me gross healthy lunches that no one ever wanted to trade me for a Fruit Rollup, being a grownup was the absolute dream. In a lot of ways, it is pretty great. We get to drink alcohol and eat pizza whenever we want and fall in love and watch dirty movies…though of course we run the risk of being fat, drunk chronic masturbators with relationship issues, but still it’s our choice. That’s pretty awesome. In that sense, the little kid version of us was totally right. Having free agency to make our own bad or great decisions, even if they come with strings, is absolutely better than having someone else dictate your decisions, even if it means a pretty great life 

                In another sense, though, that grownup who told you to slow down was brutally correct. Because while the freedom to behave however you’d like is a beautiful thing, the freedom to think what you’d like and take actions based on your beliefs is, to me, the single most terrifying thing about being an adult. After years of having our opinions shaped by our parents and our religions and our friends’ tastes, we suddenly find ourselves thrust into the world with the grave responsibility to vote and speak up about issues, taking full responsibility for the fallout. It's heart-stoppingly scary. I suspect that that’s a reason it’s always been so difficult to get young people to vote. We get so paralyzed by this sudden responsibility, or we kid ourselves into thinking our vote doesn’t matter, or that policy doesn’t affect us, and then finally we get older and realize Holy shit, there’s no generation ahead of me that can take care of our country anymore, so we reluctantly take the reins and proceed to both screw up and fix things for the next group. 

                And if being responsible for the course of history is the scariest thing about being an adult, then by far the most disappointing part is realizing just how many shades of gray exist in essentially every issue you used to be sure about. When you're a kid, you think that bad guys get caught by good guys, then get put away by good juries and good judges, and only good people get to stay out of jail. That’s the dream! That’s the game of “Cops and Robbers”, or the far-less-racially-sensitive-but-somehow-still-okay-because-you-were-a-kid “Cowboys and Indians”. Sure, sometimes bad guys seem like good guys, but then they get caught in the act and are 100% evil, so it’s fine that they die/get locked up/resign in disgrace. There are no gray areas! Superheroes and supervillains! Racists and non-racists! Cops and robbers! 

                But what if that cop kills that robber in the street and leaves him lying dead for hours in front of children? Is that still okay? Did that “bad guy” deserve to die, even if you think he really was doing something wrong? What if you don’t think he was wrong, because testimony shifts and people misremember? No one wants to believe cops can be bad, but no one wants to be okay with black men being gunned down in the street on a daily basis, because they can't all be bad guys, right? What if you think that the good people of a jury made the right call on that case, but the absolute wrong call on the next one, and people conflate the two in their calls for justice? Do you support those protestors or not? What if you support those protestors who genuinely protest, but condemn the looters? Does that mean your call for justice is weaker? Is this even the right way to ask for change at all? What if it’s the only way, no matter how imperfect? What do you do? Do you do anything at all? How do you make sure the bad guys lose, and the good guys win?

                What about rape? Don’t you, of all people, understand the horror of losing your agency in a situation, because someone grabbed you, chased you up the stairs, and waited in your room for you to come back so they could finish what they started? You support victims, people who weren’t as lucky as you, and had everything they thought was private and sacred and theirs ripped away from them, only to have a string of people ask what they were wearing/drinking/thinking that led to a violation of their bodies and minds. That’s wrong, right? You want every person, every law, and every article to protect them. But what does that mean, in practice? Can you just “teach men not to rape” and expect that things will be okay? Does blaming alcohol and drugs for creating these situations take responsibility away from rapists? What if both parties are blackout drunk and regretful of the decisions they made when their minds weren’t their own? Who is at fault? If it’s him, does that mean men are automatically at fault in a gray area? If it’s her, doesn’t that lead to people saying “Women shouldn’t get too drunk, or they can expect to get raped”, or worse “It’s not rape, it’s just regret”? What is consent, and what isn't? How do you make sure the bad guys lose, and the good guys win?

                What about journalism, whose job it is to wade through the bullshit and tell us what is right? Aren’t you in favor of reporters seeking the truth to bring about change? What if one person’s truth isn’t another’s, like the dozens of differing accounts of about five seconds of action in Ferguson, which define the line between “murder” and “self-defense”? What about Jackie’s truth in Rolling Stone, where seven boys gang raped her for hours in a frat house, destroying her physically and mentally? What about the frat house’s truth, that there was no event the night she says she was raped, and that the men she identified weren’t even brothers in that house? Whose truth is the right truth? Is Jackie the worst of the worst: a lying, vindictive bitch who wants to ruin lives of men and rape victims alike, or are her memories colored by time and the worst kind of trauma, leading to a confusion of dates, names, and even details of the rape itself? Are the frat brothers trying to cover for a horrifying crime and join the ranks of centuries of men who have fought to discredit victims of abuse, or are they just scared boys who have been dealt a grave injustice? Whose truth is the right truth, and how to do you report it? In the face of uncertainty, should you say anything at all? How do you make sure the bad guys lose, and the good guys win? 

Who are the bad guys, and why are they bad? How good are the good guys, anyway?

                It’s disappointing, how much gray there is in the world, and it crosses the line into terrifying once you make up your mind about how you feel. Because you aren’t a child anymore, so sure of yourself when you bring your “robber” into a makeshift prison of laundry baskets and pillows. Now the "robber" is a living, breathing, complicated human, and the prison isn't pillows, but cold steel and fear and regret. You’re in charge of your own actions and inactions, and all the repercussions they bring in their wake. You have the power to help bring the world to its knees, and the responsibility to build it back up from ruin. You can shape history, or stand by and watch it take shape without you. In order to do either, you have to fight through the gray and stand somewhere, because that’s what being an adult really means.

Thank God we have all that alcohol and pizza to make it through. 

T.