Regular readers know that UD…
…is interested in the anthropology of her world, which she calls ‘thesdan Culture. Now some Long Islanders are beginning to examine some of their own folkways. Here’s a columnist in the Long Island newspaper, Newsday:
Apparently, [the Duke team’s history of bad behavior] is what passes for entertainment among today's top scholar-athletes, the highest-ranking graduates of Chaminade and Delbarton and other fine suburban high schools.
…For two 20-year-old sophomores on the Duke lacrosse team, both from high-income suburban ZIP codes around here and fine Catholic schools, the landscape just got even uglier.
…For better or worse, these are our young achievers. We sent them out into the world. And whether we like it or not, their actions reflect on all of us.
…The headmaster of Seligmann's school in Jersey put out a statement yesterday, unreservedly backing him.
"Knowing Reade Seligmann as well as we do here at Delbarton," said the Rev. Luke Travers, "I believe him innocent of the charges included in the indictment."
How could the headmaster possibly know what happened so far from high school and nearly two years away? He can't possibly. But his refusal to face the ugly facts as they are now emerging mirrors all of our own.
He -- and we -- need to confront this dreadful and unfolding story before it gets too far beyond us and all of us are subsumed in a kind of home-team defensiveness.
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