About six months ago I rewatched The Scarlet Letter. The Demi Moore one. And even as I was sitting there, halfway paying attention and halfway judging the costumes, I knew it was going to boomerang back on me as an essay. And here we are. Voilà.
If you stick with me to the end, there’s a twist. Consider yourself warned.
The basic plot, if you’ve forgotten your high-school English trauma, is this: a woman, stuck in a marriage with a man who has all the charm of cold oatmeal, ends up falling in love with the new pastor. One thing leads to another, as it tends to do when human beings are involved, and she winds up pregnant while her husband is presumed dead.
The community, being what communities typically are (moralistic, bored, and eager for a spectacle) brands her with a scarlet “A” so that everyone can see her shame neatly labeled on her chest. A walking billboard of her “sin”. And, easy to read from a distance.
Public shaming used to be a common pastime. Stocks in the town square, humiliation as social glue. It worked mostly because no one wanted to be the next one strapped in.
But here’s the thing about all of this nonsense: everyone in that community had secrets. Everyone in every community has secrets. Hidden sins tucked neatly behind polite smiles and Sunday manners. And then I started thinking; dangerous, I know.
What if we leveled the playing field?
What if everyone got investigated with the same zeal we reserve for the one person whose mistakes accidentally became public? Dig through every closet, pull out every old text message, every search history, every lie, every private failure. And then slap a big, colorful letter on everyone’s chest so the whole world knows exactly what they’re dealing with.
If you’ve ever cheated: a scarlet A.
Bad parenting: a red P.
Sloth: a green S.
Petty theft, even that candy bar you “forgot” to pay for: an orange T.
Kinky proclivities (you know who you are): a pink K.
Hate and prejudice: a mauve H.
Overindulging in alcohol or any other addiction you keep insisting you’ve “got under control”: a brown Z.
Cowardice: a yellow C.
Any form of abuse; emotional, physical, verbal: a big black V.
And that’s just the PG-13 list. The real skeletons, the stuff people tell themselves no one will ever know about, those don’t even fit neatly into the alphabet. Yet they’re there, rattling around every closet.
So imagine walking around town with all that pinned to your shirt. How would you like that little stroll?
The uncomfortable truth is that judgment is often just as ugly as the things being judged. We all know the line: Let he who is without sin throw the first stone. If we took that seriously, the ground would be covered in rocks and nobody would be throwing anything.
We are at our most sanctimonious precisely when our own sins stay hidden. But maybe we don’t need my little alphabet experiment to make the point. Maybe all we need is the simple reminder that most of us are walking around with our own letters; just invisible ones.
And given that, love and compassion seem like a pretty reasonable place to start.
Because none of us are nearly as spotless as we pretend to be. Cheers.