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The next day’s news brought some hope. The jury was asking to take a closer look at the testimonies of the assistant coach and the janitor, the two eyewitness accounts that had come without the benefit of actual victim testimony. Of what interest to the jury, I reasoned, were those particular accounts, unless the jury believed the direct testimony of the eight victims? Why would a jury care about what a third-party witness had to say about alleged crimes if they didn’t believe what the actual victims had to say of the alleged crimes? Maybe it was the light of day, but I felt cheered and a growing optimism pushed back my cynicism from the night before. Still, the jury continued deliberating, all day and into that second night.
I reached for my wallet to pay my tab at Whiskers but stopped midway. The television above the bar had flashed a bulletin, the local news team interrupting the programming to announce a verdict had been reached. The place became eerily quiet as every head turned toward one of the several TVs hanging from various corners of the bar. I put my wallet away, and the bartender poured me another beer while we all awaited the announcement of the verdict. Then the bartender picked up the remote and began flipping through the TV channels. The news was seemingly on everywhere – all the national news channels had broken into their regular programming to cover the verdict. We were center stage.
Less than half an hour later a cheer went up from the crowd of hundreds who’d been holding vigil in front of the courthouse. The TV cameras rolled, and we watched the crowd cheer and knew before the news anchors even told us: the verdict was guilty. On 45 of the 48 counts, we would soon learn. And then a cheer broke out in the bar. Justice had been served; the university and the entire area had been saved. I pumped a fist into the air and savored the feeling of vindication. We were all right, after all. Everything was all right now.
“I can’t believe the emotions I’ve felt over the past couple days,” I remarked to the guy sitting beside me, Joel, a stranger an hour or so ago but a somehow familiar friend now. “I wonder why that is?” I mused.
“Why what is?” Joel asked.
“Why I feel so emotionally tied to all this. Why it matters so much to me personally when the only real issue, when you stop and think about it, ought to be that justice be served for those poor sons-of-bitches that guy raped and molested,” I said, pointing to the TV screen.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Joel said.
“I mean, it’s almost like I felt somehow part of it, part of the whole ordeal, even though it had nothing to do with me,” I continued, more or less thinking out loud. “Why is that? Why should I feel a part of something that I had nothing to do with?”
“I don’t know,” Joel answered thoughtfully. “I guess for the same reason that we feel like a part of it when the football team beats Ohio State.”
I hung around Whiskers for another half hour or so, listening to the analysis from the TV talking heads. We all watched the ex-coach child rapist being led out of the courthouse in handcuffs and ushered into the back of a police cruiser to be taken to the county jail, while people from the crowd hurled invectives at him (“rot in hell,” one woman shouted out), and then I walked home and the tall elms seemed familiar and warm again.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what Joel had said, and I found myself pondering the matter off and on over the following week. If I take the good from identifying myself with my alma mater, then I suppose it’s natural that I take the bad. But the larger question became this: why do I feel compelled to take any of it? What is it about human beings in general, I began to wonder, that makes us seek identity in institutions and other people in the first place? We gravitate towards people with whom we have something in common; that only makes sense. But when we begin to define ourselves by those groups of people, then something, I began thinking, has gone too far. Our very identities become defined by association. I am a Republican. I am a Democrat. I am a Christian. I am a Muslim. I am a Nittany Lion. I am a Buckeye. I am a New Yorker. I am a Floridian. I am an American.
The associations speak for us, so maybe, as I thought about it, it’s just a lazy way of saying who we are. Rather than recount my political beliefs, I can just tell you what party I’m registered with. Rather than describe to you all the wonderful things about where I live and of which I am proud (as if you care), I can just wear the jersey of my city’s baseball team, which also tells you I am a sports fan. I can raise a flag on the 4th of July to remind you (and perhaps myself) that I am a patriotic citizen. It’s a form of self-expression, I supposed. A way to make a statement and to be heard in a noisy world, especially if I have nothing else of value to offer, nothing else that can cut through the din. You might not know me and you might never hear of me, but you might know of the things with which I associate, and that gives me some instant value. Some street cred. It occurred to me that someone could do an interesting study: Do those who feel, for whatever reason, insufficiently valuable to society create for themselves the most associations? Do they advertise them the most conspicuously?
About G.S. Payne
