Sympathy For The Devil

Indoor soccer leagues are not particularly good about keeping things balanced. We were getting the shit kicked out of us because we were all 30 and out of shape and these kids were in high school. Since they were in high school, they were dicks. I'd just about gotten fed up when their goalie started making forays up the field in an attempt to score. Repeatedly. Just rubbing it in.

I started tracking him the next time he did it, with every intention of cleaning him out. As I reached him, he passed the ball. My fate was sealed anyway.

Without any semi-legal means of letting this guy have it, I punched him in the face. 30 seconds of rolling around later, my glasses were in tatters and I'd gotten a healthy suspension from an amateur indoor soccer league I didn't care very much about.

This is not at all what Frank Clark did. I am not drawing any sort of equivalence between the two events.

But I have been there, in the place where part of your brain that says "maybe we should think about this" is overwhelmed by a need for violence. I understand that many—too many—people come at this from the perspective of someone who has experienced or knows someone who has experienced the other end. That is valid. Of course it is. I come at it from the other end. I am a relatively normal person with a nice life, and there but for the grace of God and wife go I.

I struggle to say the appropriate things here because I think the idea of "thoughts" going out to the victims of such things is condescending at best. If you're ever in a position to help a person in that situation do it and if you're not then don't puff yourself up about how roundly you condemn such behavior. I don't see a whole lot of difference between people with the gall to blame the victim and those loudly proclaiming Clark a miserable waste of atoms.

This gets on my nerves because it's a quick leap from pointless moralizing to dismissing a guy forever as only that one thing in that one moment. I saw this picture and it took the wind out of me.

"Clark refused to look at the camera at the Perkins police station"

What did I do?

"Look at the camera."

That's not who I am.

"Look at the camera."

I thought I had left this behind.

Click.

Maybe Frank Clark's a bad guy. Or maybe one of the assholes waving him goodbye in the comments to make themselves feel better about themselves would have made the same screwup in the same situation, bottle-deep in a miserable football season after literally living a feral existence on the streets of Los Angeles for most of his youth.

It's not acceptable; Michigan had to make the decision it made. For once the program managed to handle something right. There have to be severe societal punishments for these things, and Clark's going through that.

He's got a choice now. He can be a guy that this happened to once, and he put it all away and forced all of that down as best he could and it never happened again. Or he can let it recur, and be the guy the internet says he is now. It's up to him. I don't know which way it will go, and that photo suggests he doesn't either.

I hope he makes it, and feel badly for him. Yes, as the perpetrator of a terrible thing. Yes. It is possible to be a bad person in a moment because you are wired to be angry, a wiring that comes easily when you've experienced way too much fear growing up. How many people are shitty all the time without tripping a line like Clark did?

It is heartbreaking for Frank Clark to almost make it. You should feel that part of this too.