The Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb
By William E. Hull
[Dr. William E. Hull preached this message as a Father`s Day sermon at the Mountain Brook Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on June 21, 1998. His quotations and the basic thrust of his main illustration came from the book Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb by Bernard Lefkowitz in the Men and Masculinity Series. Berkley, University California Press, 1992, 1997, 516 pages. A paperback edition was published in 1998 from which citations in this sermon were taken. Dr. Hull is University Professor at Samford University in Birmingham.]
Glen Ridge is a tranquil town in Essex County, New Jersey, a squeaky-clean, manicured community of 7,800 citizens, the antithesis of gritty Newark only five miles away. Its central values of propriety, orderliness, discretion, and continuity are enshrined in its faithfully attended churches, tree-shaded streets, spacious parks, and commodious homes. Its 666 gas lamps cast a warm glow over what one editorial writer called a "second edition of the Garden of Eden". Above all, Glen Ridge reflects a culture of achievement, a place where winners are "assertive but not belligerent, self-confident but notboastful, and determined but not driven". In short, it is a little slice of the American dream just like Mountain Brook, Alabama.
But on March 1, 1989, somethinghappened that would shatter forever the carefully guarded tranquillity of this bucolic borough. It was the kind of thing that could happen at any time in Glen Ridge. Indeed, it was typical of the way in which the quintessential lifestyle of this privileged community exploited the tension between power and vulnerability. But this time, to everyone`s surprise, the secret was exposed for all to see. Eventually, the deepest values of this very private and protective neighborhood were caught in the relentless glare of national media attention throughout a prolonged criminal trial at which "Glen Ridge`s test of character became America`s test of character". The award-winning author, Bernard Lefkowitz, spent seven years plumbing the depths of this undiagnosed disease. Let us use his brilliant work, Our Guys, as a case study of the moral malignancy of our time.
I.
(1) The Guys. The pride of the local citizenry were the stalwart young athletes who did battle for the glory of Glen Ridge on the football gridiron, baseball diamond, and wrestling mat. At the apex of the social pyramid that defined the youth culture, these princes of the playing field acted without challenge as if they owned the high school. They "were the sons of lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, teachers — people who formed the backbone of the town", people who "didn`t just show up on Sunday;they sang in the church choir, were vestrymen. They defined Glen Ridge, they made it what it was". The faith of these families was infused with a strong sense of optimism; it was but one more way to be a winner. School reinforced the primacy of athletics as a route to success. At Glen Ridge High, on the wall across from the principal`s office were glass cases displaying shelf after shelf of sports trophies, but nowhere visible was the student honor roll. The yearbook devoted twenty-three pages to athletics while the valedictorian, voted most likely to succeed, got only one small photograph on the same page as his headshot.
But even from innocent childhood, and accelerating into adolescence, this tight little clique began to cast a troubling shadow. At first it was just an arrogant swagger called the "Jock Strut", then a pattern of loud and defiant misbehavior tolerated by teachers who would have instantly punished such raucous conduct had it come from girls. But later it began to take a more sinister form: taunting and bullying anyone who challenged their supremacy, hitting a kid again and again when he was down. It featured open contempt of female students and teachers, snapping a girl`s bra strap or pinning her against a locker door, even exposing themselves in class and making obscene gestures behind a teacher`s back. To "the hunks," everyone outside their circle was viewed with disdain as "nerds" or "geeks," party "giggers" or ethnic "guidos." Because of its athletic aristocracy, life at Glen Ridge High was defined as an unremitting power struggle in which there were only winners and losers.
(2) The Girl. In this combustible mix of arrogance and dominance lived a very vulnerable young woman to whom we shall give the pseudonym of Leslie Faber. Adopted in infancy by devoted parents despite a known disability, Leslie grew into awkward adolescence with an IQ of 49 that placed her in the bottom one percent of the U. S. population, able to function only at the second-grade level of an eight year old. The school bureaucracy shuffled her from one special education program to another based on classifying her first as "neurologically impaired" and then as "mentally retarded". The jocks had their own cruel classifications when endlessly ridiculing her clumsy efforts to play games: "Leslie is a retard! Leslie is a dummy! ". They began to call her by such nicknames as "Hey, Brain-Les! Hey, Head-Les!"
Pathetically lonely, craving even a crumb of attention from the gatekeepers of a social clique that excluded her, Leslie would do anything to earn acceptance from those whom she yearned to call her friends. As she grew past puberty, gradually the realization began to dawn that her emerging sexuality might be a "means of pleasing others". The jocks, who by now had made pornography and voyeurism a dailyobsession, quickly learned that Les would let you get away with anything "if you said you really liked her and would be her friend". Soon her oversized body became a casual object of curiosity to those interested only in degrading her with obscene proposals. Her frantic parents, faced with a choice between keeping her locked in the house or letting her wander about this "Garden of Eden" full of juvenileserpents, knew nothing better to do than begin giving her birth control pills.
(3) The Basement. Finally all of the lurid propositions, the panting phone calls, the experiments with frozen hot dogs reached an inevitable climax on the first day of March in 1989. While Leslie was playing alone in a public park, the gang invited her to the basement of a nearby home where some of the best parties in town were often held. When at first she hesitated, they promised her a date with her favorite football hero and so she naively complied. Once there with thirteen of Glen Ridge`s "finest," they disrobed her, insisted that she engage in auto-eroticism and oral sex, and then penetrated the most intimate recesses of her body, first with a bright red broom handle, then with a regulation size baseball bat, and finally with a musical drumstick that she had picked up on the playground. As the proceedings became more degrading, six of the boys left without any effort to stop the seven who remained to the end. On the next day, two of the Jocks propositioned Leslie to return for an encore that could be captured on film, but this time, in pain and confusion, she reluctantly declined.
Obviously, many shocking details emerged in the twenty-one week trial that would offend our deepest sensibilities if recounted here. But let not this recital of the "bare facts" obscure what happened in the basement on that fateful afternoon. At the moral level, this was a totally exploitive act which left a vulnerable young woman both physically abused and emotionally battered. As the policewoman trained in rape intervention who was assigned to the case concluded, long before any criminal guilt was assessed, "what these celebrated young men of Glen Ridge had done was ugly. It was barbaric. It was inhuman. It made [her] sick. How could they do that to another human being?". The central mystery of all was why.
"Why did such a thing happen? Why in this peaceful little town of all places? Why these young men, the most pampered and favored boys in a town filled with pampered kids?". "What went wrong in the perfect suburb?".
II.
After five hundred pages of probing analysis, Lefkowitz brings the reader to one inescapable conclusion: The cause was in the culture. We tend to think of evil in terms of personal decision, but none of the Glen Ridge Seven, either individually or collectively, plotted to molest Leslie Faber. Rather, it was just "something to do" that was consistent with the way they thought and acted every day of their lives. It never occurred to any of them as they walked down those basement stairs that they were about to commit a felony, or violate a moral code, or cross the line that defines human decency. To be arrested, tried, and convicted took them totally by surprise because their outrageous conduct was part and parcel of a lifestyle that had been tolerated, if not tacitly approved, by their parents, school officials, town leaders, and youthful peers for as long as they could remember. What they did was but the natural expression of what it meant to be a jock in Glen Ridge.
To put it as simply as possible, they acted out of a culture of consent shaped by the core values of the community. It was this culture, as pervasive as the air they breathed, which defined for them at an instinctive level what was permissible. They inflicted their cruel fantasies on Leslie Faber for an hour, without so much as a second thought, precisely because of what they had gotten away with for a decade. They were the children of a culture that did not have embedded in its foundations those norms that would have made such reprehensible acts unthinkable. To understand the anatomy of that culture, a culture that Glen Ridge fought to protect to the bitter end, is to understand the pathology of the evil which it spawned. Since culture is nothing less than a collective way of life, it has many component assumptions and attitudes. Here we identify only three for closer examination.
(1) The Worship of Success. As already hinted, Glen Ridge aggressively fostered a culture of achievement. Its men were business and professional leaders, their wives were civic and social leaders. Which meant that their children must become leaders too. The only way to do this before assuming adult responsibilities was in the youthful games that they played, beginning with Bandbox softball at age six. As they grew older the games became more ferocious, climaxing with high school football, the supreme training ground for learning to become a winner. The virtues most highly prized were those of competitiveness, assertiveness, and brute strength. The name of the game was winning, which meant conquest and control. And the way to win was through a team effort that increasingly sealed the gladiators in a hermetic all-male world. There was little or no time for serious study, for adult conversation, or for kids with other priorities. They belonged only to the brotherhood that wore a uniform, that had its own secret codes and inside jokes.
Parents contented themselves that these activities were organized and supervised. "Their kids were playing by the rules, the game rules and the social rules. No waywardness, no improvisation, no accidental friendships with out-of-town kids. And no frivolity. This was serious recreation" and, as such, was the only thing that they took seriously. But with the passion to win came an undisguised contempt for losers or those who chose to play other games. Because girls lacked the strength for contact sport, they were relegated to the sidelines where they fulfilled the decorative role of cheering their heroes on. Eggheads who wanted to match their minds with ideas were scorned as book-worms. Ethnic minorities had no place in this WASP culture unless they could offer their heft as uncomplaining linemen. But most vulnerable of all were the handicapped, like Leslie Faber, whose disabilities excluded them from ever achieving any measure of success as Glen Ridge defined it. They were useful only to be taunted, embarrassed, and humiliated as if, in some perverse way, this ignominy would confirm the reigning view of what it meant to be a winner.
(2) The Strategy of Silence. The adults knew, of course, that unrestrained macho had its downside, as they put it that "boys will be boys." But they treated this recognition as a dark secret to be shrouded in silence because to do otherwise would be to admit failure–and failure had no place in their culture of achievement. Once embarked upon this course, they clung to the strategy of silence even as evil began to escalate. Because the town folk could not bring themselves to talk about their problems, they were unable to face them, much less to do anything about them. In silence they could not inform each other, or learn from each other, or encourage each other, or–heaven forbid–admonish each other. Their collective conspiracy of silence created the perfect moral vacuum in which the ugly malignancy was free to metastasize.
By the time the Jocks were seniors, they had compiled an impressive record of outrageous behavior. Every social event included compulsive binge drinking, but the drug prevention counselor at the high school lamented, "Parental resistance is my main problem; parents just don`t want to hear about alcohol and drugs". Girls were being treated in a callous and domineering way that featured spectator sex for the enjoyment of the gang. Violence erupted especially at parties in the homes of students whose parents were away. Once an entire three-floor residence was trashed for no reason at all, but neither the perpetrators nor their parents ever said they were sorry, or offered to clean up the mess, or helped to pay for the damage. The student who was victimized never came back to Glen Ridge High, her family moved away, and the Jocks listed in the yearbook under "personal highlights" their participation in "Ryan`s Wreck" as a memorable event of the high school years. Those on the cutting edge of raising hell simply gained a greater degree of legitimacy and authority for their vicious exploits because no one spoke up to say loud and clear, "This is wrong!".
(3) The Curse of Consequences. Most alarming of all was the unwillingness of the culture to reach a verdict, to pass judgment on anything, to admit that attitudes and acts have consequences. This refusal to practice moral discernment began by clothing evil in euphemisms. When Glen Ridge was forced by the media to face what their guys had done, the best they could manage was to call it a "tragedy," a carefully neutral word that made brutal rape in the basement sound almost like an act of God. In discussing the "incident" they absolved the boys of moral responsibility by substituting temperament for character, i.e. they were just being "hyper" and "upbeat". They wanted the demonic to wear a psychological mask which made sheer depravity merely a matter of developmental "growing pains".
The upshot of this evasiveness was the abdication of moral decision-making. When the schoolwanted to hire a crisis intervention counselor, parents changed the title to School Assistance Counselor, gutted the job description, and soon eliminated the position. When the principal tried to impose tougher discipline, all hell broke loose among parents who said that keeping someone after school for misbehaving was a "Gestapo method". The tougher discipline policy was dropped the next year and shortly thereafter the principal resigned. When the school offered special programs for the most malicious of the malcontents, parents responded in rage, "You`re after my kid". On the all-important matter of athletic eligibility, only grades were allowed to count, not conduct. No one was ever disqualified because of behavior, however flagrant. Even when team captains were selected, no one questioned "whether they had the ethics, the values, the character" to hold a leadership position.
III.
We have now seen how early warning signals were going off loud and clear in a culture that was tone deaf. For all of its business prowess and social sophistication, Glen Ridge had not a clue as to how evil actually works to wreak havoc. The "leading citizens" actually believed that if you try hard enough to succeed, and simply ignore all evidence to the contrary, things are bound to turn out all right in the end. Suffice it to say that such a pathetic theology belongs in the hell that it visited on those who adopted it as their creed! Which raises in acute form the question of what we as parents can do to combat the degradation that is corrupting the morals of our youth. Based on the diagnosis of the sickness, I have three prescriptions to offer.
(1) Create a New Hierarchy of Values. It is now abundantly clear that assigning the highest value to winning leads to relationships of dominance and submission, of coercion and exploitation, of victor and victim. If unchallenged, which challenge winners seldom permit, this mindset leads to the absurd notion that the more one achieves in terms of affluence, power, and reputation, the more one is exempt from the seductions of sin. Over and over again the parents of Glen Ridge sought to solve the problems of their delinquent kids by making "restitution," i.e. paying for the damage, as if money could somehow cure a moral cancer. No progress is possible unless we can somehow get it through our thick spiritual skulls that money does not inoculate against evil! Granted our propensity to pride and exaggerated self-confidence, we are never in greater danger of corruption than when basking in the spotlight of success.
The only defense is to construct a new hierarchy of values, one with love rather than power at its pinnacle, one that emphasizes respect for human dignity, fairness in human relations, and decency in human conduct. Central to this constellation of virtues is compassion, a costly caring for the less fortunate who may lack our generous endowments. There is no moral principle more central to Biblical teaching than the protection of the vulnerable, whether they be widows or orphans, the lame or the blind, the elderly or the handicapped, the stranger or the despised minority. The measure of our morality is not in how we treat the strong but in how we treat the weak. We must face squarely the fact that Jesus radically reversed the "`winner-take-all" approach to life in his teaching on becoming "servant-of-all" (Mark 10:42-44).
(2) Model Values by Behavior. Children and youth are not instructed or persuaded very effectivelyby ethical abstractions. They need to see morality in concrete behavior in order to grasp its claim on their lives. That is why they like games so much. The contest is acted out on the playing field with the results visible on the scoreboard for all to see. The rules are not buried in a book but are as tangible as the whistle in the referee`s mouth. Just so, the high calling of parents is to act out in unmistakable terms the values which they would inculcate in their children. Words are also important, especially in stories that describe desirable character traits, but words are best used to interpret and commend conduct which the child has already seen in action. In one sense, family life should be viewed as an arena where morality games are played in contest with the alternatives so seductively marketed by a secular culture.
This modeling of a servant morality for our children is not a matter of contrived behavior which we must create. Rather, the opportunity is there every time the yard man comes to the back door for a drink of water, every time an elderly person holds up the cafeteria line with her shuffling gait, every time a child forgets his piece at the piano recital, every time an epileptic drools at the corner of the mouth, every time a high school dropout murders the King`s English. Believe me, kids know the difference, when they see it, between condescension and contempt on the one hand and sensitivity and compassion on the other. The terrifying truth is that, to a large extent, they will grow up to do what they have seen us do. Are you going to teach them by your example that winners can do no wrong and losers can do no good, or are you going to teach them how to help every person reach their God-given potential by showing a generous measure of patience, encouragement, and respect for winners and losers alike?
(3) Build a Culture of Integrity. Despite the enormous importance of parental example, our children are also profoundly influenced by their peers, therefore we must also work to shape a youth culture congenial to these values. Admittedly it is hard to break the silence and talk face-to-face with other parents about what is really going on in the community, about what behavior is permissible and what behavior is prohibited, about what movies and television programs may be watched, about what punishment is appropriate for various infractions and how it should be consistently administered. It is hard to hammer out an acceptable code of conduct based on a broad consensus of home, school, and church. It is hard to roll back the excesses of an entire generation that have landed us in our present chaos. It is perhaps hardest of all to restrict alcohol when parents drink, to restrict sex when parents are having an affair, and to exalt home life when parents are never at home.
But my deepest conviction is that, hard as it is for parents to function as responsible moral agents, it is even harder to ignore the problem in the vain hope that it will go away. So I call you beyond the conspiracy of silence to become evangelists for a culture of integrity, to shape a total setting in which the soul of your child can grow a moral backbone. Listen, parents, it is never rude, never awkward, never inappropriate to face reality and act responsibly when your kids are being relentlessly pressured to go straight to hell. Most, if not all, of you may reply that things are not that bad in your home, which I hope to God is the case. But I plead with you: Don`t wait until something happens in the basement before you begin to practice responsible parenting
