Being brave is as simple as opening your mouth
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- December 18, 2017
- 1008
I’ll be the first to admit it. When the first few allegations of sexual misconduct against celebrities, politicians and other high-profile folks of similar ilk came to light, I viewed each with a certain level of skepticism.
Personally, that’s just how I was made. I’ll always have a touch of mistrust in instances like these, especially when there is money to be made by the accusers.
But when I suggested my skepticism to my wife — ever the beacon of unassuming level-headedness and perspective — she looked at me as though I had two heads.
Such behaviors, it seems, have gone on for eons outside the scope of my naïve perspective as a male member of society. And they’ve gone on to such an extent that they’ve just been tolerated, if not flat out expected, by women in the work place.
As a guy who is generally oblivious to such things, my response has pretty much gone from surprise and shock in the early days to "welp, we all saw that coming" in more recent times.
But the longer this thing goes on and as an even greater number of people who previously believed their actions had no consequences are brought back to Earth, the closer our society gets to being what it always should’ve been.
Over the past few weeks, all this hit a tick closer to home when two well-known chefs were forced to step away from their restaurant empires amid allegations. As someone who works in the food industry, I get the opportunity to interact with chefs all the time. And in neither case — nor really any case it seems — does it appear any of this happened in a vacuum. That is nobody seemed to be doing any of this in secret. Nearly every time there was someone else turning a blind eye.
Victims, over and over again, will say they chose not to report these instances because they felt alone and no one would believe them.
Try as we may, there will always be bad people choosing to do bad things to good people. There will always be folks looking for an easy way to get what they want and when they want it.
But as with any sports team, any healthy office environment or any group of high-performing individuals, the best societies function when their participants police each other. That’s where all this needs to start. As a culture we truly are our brother’s keeper, and it’s time we started acting like it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The time is always right to do what’s right.”
And despite what some may argue, our society should be rooted in some sort of moral code to uphold what is right and just. We may disagree on what all that entails, but stepping forward to quash wrong-doers should be the norm.
We teach our children that bravery is something that’s often connected to an act of physical heroism. But sometimes being brave is as simple as opening your mouth and pointing out something that just isn’t right.
That’s something we’re all capable of doing.