The Boy in the Red Hat

Yesterday my feeds were flooded with pictures and video of a group of male students from a Catholic school in Kentucky flashing their MAGA colors. At some point, in some way, the group came into contact with a Native American elder, there to protest. He was surrounded by this group, who chanted wildly inaccurate campaign slogans at him and laughed and jeered and captured everything on their iPhones.

There were plenty of them there, gleeful in the face of their utter banality, but one! One stood out. The condemnation was quick — and at times, terrifying in its intensity.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly it was about that one, particular boy which caused such a visceral reaction of loathing for so many — myself included. Sure, chanting “build the wall” to a Native American is probably the apex of irony and ignorance, but Native Americans have been treated far worse, insulted in ways great and small by people far more important than this boy. It’s hardly the worst video we’ve seen. No one was mown down by a car. No was was assaulted or harmed. The police weren’t called, endangering a life.

So what was it about this particular boy in this particular moment that evoked so much rage? Because I’m going to be honest with you.

I wanted to punch him.

I wanted to punch him right in his smug, smarmy face. I wouldn’t of course, nor would I advocate for anyone else to and I’m happy no one did. But the desire was there, bubbling up in my blood every time I came across his picture. The desire to smack the look of entitlement off his barely old enough to shave cheeks getting stronger each time I saw him.

The mother in me longed to box his ears and send him to his room to think about what he had done and did he realize how disappointing his actions were?

One boy’s face, spreading around the world like so much climate-change induced wildfire, a catalyst for the explosion of so much pent up rage.

In the end it doesn’t matter who he is because the level of rage one boy’s face invoked? It has nothing to do with him, the individual— I’m hardly going to give him that power. He’s a symbol. A cardboard cut-out. A stand-in for all the boys and yes, even girls, we’ve all known.

He’s every smart-ass kid who shoved another kid into a row of lockers in high school, the one whose mom or dad was friends with the principal — or were rich enough, or loud enough, or knew the right people. Or just plain annoying enough that his actions were protected and justified. He’s every Squee and PJ and Kavanaugh who never doubted some imagined birthright of supremacy because no one ever challenged it. He’s every James Spader character. He’s Blain from Pretty in Pink. He’s Brock Turner. He’s every boy who’s never been held accountable, who has never had to answer for their actions. The ones who grew into Harvey Weinsteins and Les Moonves. He’s every white boy who assumes he would have gotten that acceptance letter from Harvard if it weren’t for that black kid or that ‘chink’ girl — because that’s what he’s heard at home. He’s every kid who walks through hallways and malls and down streets with a chest puffed up with the arrogant assumption that the world is only what it is because of people like him. He’s every incel that screams a woman who wants the rights to her own body should shut up and go make him a sandwich. He’s every kid who has ever lied about screwing a cheerleader behind the bleachers and laughed as she was called a slut. He’s every kid who made the life of the gay student hell. He’s every kid who got off, who was never punished, whose shitty behavior was overlooked or explained away, the one whose parents came to school and demanded the teachers discipline the kid who was standing up to him. He’s the one who’s convinced he’s been hard done by — the victim in all this, boys will be boys, after all. He’s the one that gets chance after chance after chance because ‘his future will be ruined by this.”

Chances the rest of us almost never get.

Yesterday’s reaction was so ragged and raw because so many of us recognize the boy in the red hat. We know him, even though we don’t know this particular HIM. We’ve all witnessed the cruelty that lay just below the surface of boys like that, wrapped in a layer of entitled protection. Because there are rarely any consequences for these boys, for boys like that.

And so yesterday the collective unconscious rose up and demanded them.

So when Twitter exploded, demanding retribution, it was no surprise. I don’t agree with public doxxing. This boy’s life will be hell — not only because of his actions on that particular day, because he’s now the symbolic, public face of decades of resentment toward others just like him.

We all knew that kid. He’s just the last in a long line of boys in red hats.