Whatever Happened to Shame?

“Hey, look,” the kid said to me. He was grinning as he pulled up his pant leg, “I got fleas. This,” he pointed to the band around his shin, “kills fleas.” He was utterly unembarrassed, unchagrinned.
I didn’t bother to ask why he had the tether. That would, to his mind, have been completely irrelevant. It would have been. I’ve seen so many tethers on high school kids, called so many names for attendance, only to have somebody call out, “He’s in court.” Or “he’s in jail.”
No shame attaches to it. Occasionally I will overhear older boys impressing younger students with descriptions of what it is like “inside”—or how to survive it. Very often a prison record is a badge of honor. I hear the pride in a younger brother’s voice as he explains that his older sibling is doing time.
Pregnant girls feel no disgrace either. Nor does the boy or girl who explains why the assignment isn’t done or the test cannot be taken. “I was kicked out last week.” Or there’s the student I find casually rifling through a teacher’s desk. He or she is merely annoyed at being asked to stop.
There’s the thirteen year old girl whose mother tells her to go out and get pregnant—“We need the welfare cheque.” After you’ve been subbing in a dozen districts in over fifty schools—suburban and inner city—these things no longer faze you.
It’s like living in New York and learning to step over the drunk lying prostrate on the sidewalk without looking down. (If you try to help or question him, he will merely curse you.) So you let these comments and discussions go right on past you.
Occasionally a student will leer at you and ask, “Did you hear what he [or she] said?” I plead deafness or pretend not to have heard the question. Just the way I recently ignored the dope deal going down in a suburban high school, right out in the parking lot—next to my car.
But I can’t help overhearing some of it. The things young men and young women freely say to each other—and the vocabulary they use to say it—stun me. (I’ve known what most four-letter words mean since I was in middle school—but we didn’t suggest that someone actually do it, right in class.)
Then there’s the way they dress. Sagging pants, with the belt line barely above mid thigh is no longer limited to inner city schools. I’ve seen all the underpants (or buttock cleavage above low cut jeans) I ever want to, male and female.
When a young lady in a middle class school comes up to my desk and leans over to ask a question, it can be distracting to look at her. Very little more is hidden than was in a 1950s Playboy. It was been suggested to me that middle class mothers are proud that their daughters make such appealing bait.
We have become a society completely devoid of shame or embarrassment. That may explain why some of the same people that made millions fraudulently selling overleveraged mortgages have changed company names and gone right back into business pressing the FHA to take on equally fraudulent government guaranteed mortgages.
(Businessweek reports that the Federal Housing Authority has only three people who check up on the backgrounds of these reincarnated mortgage brokers—with the same previously indicted officers. Nobody’s taking it too seriously, but BW suggests that the FHA may become your next Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Nobody’s embarrassed.)
If they were never taught that there are actions to be ashamed of as kids, why would we ever expect them to know it as adults?
Shame is like the burn mechanism in our skins. It teaches us that certain things should be left alone—that some things should not be touched. Medical research will tell you what kinds of horrible things can happen to someone who has lost his or her sense of pain. He literally doesn’t realize when he’s burning up.
Horrible things can happen to a society in which the shame mechanism has been lost, too. We’ve been seeing that on Wall Street lately. They hurt because they’ve lost money (or a job), but they’re not embarrassed or ashamed.
That makes the rest of us hurt.