A Catholic university puts its ethos front and center, and suffers particularly acute derision when three of its students act with such rank cruelty as to attract the attention of the nation.
A double amputee had left her wheelchair near a set of stairs in the bar where the Mercyhurst hockey players were drinking (she was using the bathroom), and one of them – a star player, son of a famous player – pushed it down the stairs, messing it up.
So there’s an everyday human reality. A woman who can’t walk nonetheless negotiates the complicated, difficult business of getting out of the house and socializing with friends; in order to go to the toilet, she has to put her chair aside and be carried into the Ladies’ by one of her friends, placed on the seat, helped to wash her hands, etc, etc. After this challenging feat, she is eager to reclaim her chair, but it’s messed up at the bottom of a stairway.
Here’s another everyday reality: Three beautiful, young, able-bodied, drunk athletes who play at the highest collegiate level in what is routinely called the world’s cruelest sport notice a wheelchair at the top of some stairs in a bar. They don’t notice the camera directed precisely at them. Too drunk, too stupid.
One of them – son of a Canadian ice hockey legend – is therefore filmed hurling the chair to the bottom of the stairs and then returning to steady soaking with his buddies.
Forced by outraged bar personnel to apologize, he perfunctorily does and then says: “Do I still have to go?”
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All three have been suspended from the school’s team, but the suspension won’t last long. They have also been barred from the bar. These are of course small things.
Global press attention, with all the gory details and the viral video, is not a small thing. The contempt of their community is not a small thing.
The mandated sensitivity sessions to which they will be subjected are not small things, but they’re not that big.
The lawsuit we might expect from the woman, reasonably enough claiming humiliation and other forms of injury, is a big thing.
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For people to respond very intensely to cruelty, it needs to come in, as it were, bite-sized form. We have trouble truly grasping mass cruelty; we have no problem whatsoever, since we viscerally, intimately, feel it in our own bones, grasping singular cruelty. The arrogance, the nonchalance, with which this guy dispatched that woman’s lifeline, her dignity, her absolute necessity, and then turned back to the bar, is just too bloody manifest, I’m afraid. In this matter, the whole world’s a stage. Da guy’s a regular Iago.
Having been unveiled, he will have to live his unveiling. The next time he trods the boards, he might want to prepare for boos.