Was Your Childhood Hero a Scumbag?

Or just a human being

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Can you recall loving a public figure — a male entertainer, perhaps, whose persona and life philosophy you were really “into” — only to learn many years later that he took sexual advantage of women? So now all you can think when you hear his name, is that he was a predator. A total scumbag.

Our childhood fairy tales did us a disservice. They taught us that people are either all good or all bad — either heroes or villains. Either you can trust them, or you can’t. This had a profoundly unfair effect on our grownup judgments.

Several times in my life, I have had friends who, years later, acted selfishly and took advantage of me. My childhood consciousness would conclude that this person really had me fooled. For a long time I thought they were a hero, but they must have always been a nefarious scoundrel who had evil intentions toward me.

Which may be the black-and-white way that we delineate characters in a children’s book. But real human beings are not so all-or-nothing.

How would you like to be judged so harshly? Yes, maybe you were a total asshole to somebody in your life. But does that mean that you never had a sincere, unselfish relationship with anybody else?

Maybe the person you knew in your youth really did treat you well. You have no justification for thinking, years later and in retrospect, that he wasn’t being honest with you, just because he had a psychological failing which made him treat some other people badly.

When I hear terrible things about an old friend, all I can say is, “What a shame. He was always good to me.” This doesn’t mean I doubt the “Me, Too” testimony. It doesn’t mean that I think the person reporting it is a liar. It just means that my experience was different.

It recognizes that the same human being can be an angel to one person and a devil to another.

It’s not an excuse, it’s the truth. It just happens.

I have played both roles myself.

Situations change and people are always developing. We are thrust into a difficult and complicated world, and some of the ways we try to cope with it are more productive than others.

Some ways are just stupidly bad. But we don’t know that until we have ridden them to the end of the trail. And by that time, all we can do is suffer the consequences and try to make amends.

And all of our decisions — the good, the bad and the ugly — have contributed to who we are today.