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The Shame Game
“Shame off you,” he said.
It was the first time I’d heard that term, and I was a little taken aback until I realized that he was exactly right. Shame is something we wear, like a wet, smelly blanket someone dons for no good reason. Some bully at some point threw it over the person’s shoulders, and unless that person chooses to shrug it off, there it stays, and the bully wins.
If shame stays on that person, it will saturate everything in their life and leave an odor that eventually the wearer and those around them just get used to. Shame might become an excuse for failure, or a tool they use to manipulate others. Shame dominates the individual wearing it, or it’s a weapon in the hands of those who wield it. It’s more dangerous than a virus, more destructive than a riot, and more deadly than a bullet.
Has anyone been shaming you lately?
Perhaps you’ve endured shame for wearing or not wearing a mask. Or, have you been silent about world events for fear of being shamed out of the public discourse? Are you being shamed because you stand for the National Anthem and honor America and its history? Are you a doctor being shamed by the media because you dare to testify about your first-hand experience?
If so I have a word for you: Shame off of you.
Shame off as you stand with your hand over your heart, lift your eyes to that bright beautiful flag, honor all that it represents, and sing your heart out. You live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, even though your kneeling teammates may not understand that. Shame off them, too.
Shame off you as you walk into the grocery store and enjoy the benefits of plentiful and affordable goods, available because of a Capitalist system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history. As you walk the aisles with or without a mask, hold your head high, smile, and greet your neighbor, because only you get to decide how best to take care of your family.
Shame off you as you stand before the memorials of those who came before — moved and humbled by their sacrifice, and emboldened with the fortitude to do likewise in your own era against threats similar to the ones faced by the figures immortalized in bronze.
Shame off you as you gather together in worship, and lay hands on one another in love and obedience to a higher authority. Let the world know that no matter how many lies are allied against truth, no matter how forcefully the powerful attack liberty, and no matter how many people you care about are deceived into complacency, you will refuse to hang your head in shame.
Those who perpetuate shame have a distinct characteristic that may seem familiar to you. They’re just like the schoolyard bullies of days past. They mock, ridicule, lie and want nothing more than to feel superior in their own insecurity. They harbor pain, live in fear, and seek to diminish others to avoid being alone in their despair.
Not that long ago there was a universally recognized two-step process for handling a bully: Step 1, ignore them and move on. If they persisted to attack, one was forced to move on to Step 2: Stand up to them.
For the last four months, we’ve seen a lot of Step 1 playing out. It hasn’t worked. The bullies have become emboldened and fear neither reproach nor reality. They’re intent on winning and they’re using shame to do so. But though shame can be a powerful weapon in the hands of a bully, its effectiveness is dependent on one thing: Consent.
Which leads us to Step 2.
Nobody can shame you without your consent, and it’s high time the bullies understand that. Make no mistake. Standing up to the bullies may cost you everything, maybe even your life. This year many brave people have discovered that holding their heads high makes them easy targets.
Of course, the bullies also fear the truth. They combat it, distort it, and when all else fails…they delete it. To those who are standing in the fire of media elites, hell-bent on shaming those they disagree with: Shame off you.
The bullies will soon turn their ire toward the next target, because like a virus, shame needs a host to survive.
But also like a virus, there is a way to defeat it. You defeat shame by taking a deep breath of fresh air as you lift your smiling face to the shining sun. You defeat shame by taking obedient steps, walking in truth, and speaking it with your head held high.
In short, you defeat it by being shameless.
Published in General
General agreement. However, when one’s talking about illegal activity and the consequences for it, it’s not up to us to substitute ‘kindness’ for the punishment of the law, even when we think kindness is the order of the day and the Christian thing to do (of course it is.) I think C.S. Lewis covers this about as well as anyone can in his essay, Forgiveness, which appears in Mere Christianity:
I’ve been wrestling with this for a couple of years now, ever since someone in my family was murdered by a couple of worthless thugs. (I see what I did there. It probably means I haven’t crossed the Rubicon of kindness or forgiveness, but OTOH, I am glad they’re both serving jail time; one of them, most likely for life. The rest of it, as it pertains to me, is a work in progress.
Right on, right on.
“Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” doesn’t mean pretending they never did anything wrong. It means forgiving. And help in repentance is also a blessing well worth praying for.
I think, when you’re looking at examples of public shaming from outside (i.e. you are neither the shamer or the shamee), it can be difficult to know the quality of the shame. After all, you’re not the person who’s most affected by it.
And in terms of the sort of shaming described in the OP (the cowardly, lying, bullying sort), if you’re a twelve-year old chubby girl with knock-knees, braces, glasses, and a predilection for schoolwork and spending time in the library, being cruelly mocked, shamed and ridiculed, either in the playground or on Facebook, especially by people you thought were your friends, just might be the end of your world, and at least the equivalent of being fired from your job or (literally) beaten by a mob. You might not be able to imagine anything worse. And the outcome might be tragic.
Even an adult who is the target of what I’ll call “personal” shaming–that is, shame and excoriation heaped on them by people they know, by their “friends”–may go a bit wobbly before hopefully coming to grips with it, squaring her shoulders and, in the words of the OP, “taking a deep breath of fresh air as [she lifts her] smiling face to the shining sun…taking obedient steps, walking in truth, and speaking it with [her] head held high.”
“Personal” shamers choose their victims well, usually because they know them so well. My mother was pretty good at personal shaming, one of the best I’ve ever known. She had a mind like a steel trap when it came to collecting and storing a person’s vulnerabilities, and her decisions about who needed to be shamed, and for what, rivaled anything the Left might come up with on the intersectionality scale. She’d have made an excellent military interrogator. She got worse as she got older, and as the eldest child, I got off fairly lightly, especially since she disowned me for years immediately following my marriage to Mr. She (much shaming there). But my sister and brother still bear the scars. And she was, often, a sore trial to my Dad, who loved her till the day he died.
IMHO, it takes a special kind, and degree, of cruelty to shame people you know this way.
An awful lot of what we’re seeing today though is “random” shaming (random only in the sense that the victims could be anyone, and are very often not known to those who are shaming them). It’s ideological shaming, political shaming, and cultural shaming. It’s shaming that’s really only possible because of the Internet. A person is shamed for having the wrong ideas. And the shamers are generally an anonymous mob who don’t care who they have in their sights. They only know that they are right, and that anyone who stands in their way must be destroyed. It’s dystopian, Orwellian sense, and horrible too. And of a different quality than personal shaming. But is it of a higher, or lower, or better or worse, or more shameless, or shameful quality? And are the people who do it more, or less, evil?
I don’t know.
What is the proper punishment for licking a carton of ice cream and putting it back in the store’s refrigerator? Jail? A fine? Or 24 hours in the socks.
A creative judge would make them purchase and eat all of every carton of that flavor, and keep their phone till they do. But then, I’m a dad.
A book that should be read at least once every three years.
Have you ever read anything by Father Stephen Freeman? He writes frequently on the subject of shame, both in its healthy and unhealthy forms. This is something of a foretaste.
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2019/07/02/shame-and-the-modern-identity/
I would have to see the socks first.
Isn’t that pretty normal for humanity?
That is a good question.
The store should ban the person for as long as they like; life is fine. But that’s not punishment, that’s just safety and public trust.
There’s the health threat, the added Covid threat, the gross factor, the random victim factor, the it-probably-happens-more-than-we’d-like-to-think-so-overkill-will-prevent-others factor which is closely aligned with preventing it from being a ‘new cool thing to do’ phenomenon. There is the part where it was filmed which makes it simultaneously more offensive but at least allows us to catch the person. And the person was a minor so one can only go so far – capital punishment would be too extreme unless the ice cream was vanilla because that’s my favorite.
Flogging. It’s cheap and it’s it’s a good dissuasion.
Argyles. Thigh-high. In pink and puce. And made of the world’s itchiest wool.
Smelly, worn, holey socks. Same for the stocks.
Let’s try that again with the straw men and false dichotomies excluded. #1–That Trump opposes the bullies of the Left (e.g. by using forbidden terminology like “China virus”) doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t bully others in turn. #2–That many of the people Trump goes after are Deep Staters out to get him doesn’t necessarily mean they all are. #3– Change “only“ to “typically“ and it’s a true statement. #4–In today’s culture and society, conservatives usually have too little power to bully anybody, alas!