Can Blood Be Too Thick

All the time we see on TV friends and family members of criminals, politicians, and other public figures who are guilty of misconduct standing by their loved ones.  Most recently I recall the wife of General Jeffery Sinclair asking that he not be reduced in rank because it would be a hardship for his family to live on the retirement pay of a Lieutenant Colonel.  Really, I bet a lot of Lieutenant Colonels find that pretty hard to stomach.  Even more important is the given fact that during his career, Sinclair most certainly ended the careers of subordinates for far less egregious misconduct than he himself received a mere slap on the wrist for without giving a moment’s consideration to their families.

The family members of George Zimmerman come to mind as well. Not only were they strong supporters of his right to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager, they showed total indifference to the feelings of Treyvon Martin’s family, displaying a “he got what he deserved” attitude.

Looking at these two examples, I have to wonder if perhaps friends and families can and often do go too far in their support.  Personally I suspect that in the case of General Sinclair, the good ole’ boy network of Army General Officers chose to look the other way until they no longer could, as they always do when it comes to one of their own. 

 I once supervised a young soldier who had served in a clerical position in the Office of the Vice Chief of Staff, Army.  He candidly told me that misconduct by the Army’s most senior leaders was fairly common place and included numerous instances of adultery, misappropriation, and even shoplifting.  He was responsible for typing up the letters of reprimand, i.e. wrist slaps that never kept these officers from being further promoted because they were maintained in an area of their personnel file that no one would ever see. Mind you, he never told me the names of these personnel, but having been a Military Police Officer and seen some cases myself, I found no reason to doubt what he said. So the question I pose is how long do friends and family members have to ignore the bad behavior of a person before it causes real harm and/or escalates to more serious criminal behavior?

I was inspired to write this piece as a follow-up to an earlier blog Bad People Do Bad Things, Count on It. I had known the subject of that blog (let’s call him “Sam”) for nearly five years and had personally witnessed him behave inappropriately on a number of occasions.  Beyond that, I had heard of other things from mutual acquaintances that Sam had done before I ever knew him.  Even I was guilty of looking the other way and making excuses for him on some level.  When you have an adult man (pushing 70) who doesn’t make any attempt to control his use of profanity in public no matter how many young children are present, chases waitresses into the kitchens of restaurants, and actually salutes the breasts of the well endowed daughter of a friend, and the only response he gets from his wife is to giggle and say “Oh Sam,” you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that he probably doesn’t actually see his behavior as at all inappropriate.

I wrote the initial blog as an outlet for frustration due to his actually getting away with unethical and illegal conduct, but I admit that I secretly hoped that either he or a member of his family would see the piece and know who I was talking about.  I don’t know what kind of response I expected from any of them if any of them read it, but fantasized about Sam stomping around the room blustering about slander and law suits and even contacting a lawyer only to learn that not only had he not been named in the blog, but neither was the school or the community so he had no case. Of course beyond that, I hadn’t written anything that was not 100% true, he really did those things.  In any case, as recently as this week it became obvious that someone in his family had read the blog and knew who it was about.  I know this because his adult children had “unfriended” me, my husband, and both my daughters on Facebook.  Really, like I want anything to do with people of this caliber.  I am laughing picturing the family meeting with the wife blubbering about their reputations and Sam trying to figure out how to get revenge. Sadly, what I cannot imagine happening is either of those children asking him “did you do those things?”  Obviously the “rotten” apples didn’t fall far from that tree.

Life has many lessons and one of many things that I take away from this experience is that some families stick together no matter what; beyond that, they justify the bad behavior of each other.  We did not raise our daughters to never question the behavior of their parents or to accept everything we do as the best and only way.  You can bet that had my husband done what Sam did and someone wrote about it identifying him only by his conduct, I would never, ever have told my daughters about it and asked them to support him.  Their first question would have been, “did Dad actually do those things?”

No one is perfect and good all of the time, but I firmly believe that especially as parents, we lead by example.  What we teach our children when they are young and the examples we set for them are what makes them who they are as adults.  Here, and in everything, the adult children of Sam are behaving the only way they can, circling the wagons and justifying his bad behavior…and their own children are watching.  That alone in all of this makes me sad.