Former President Bill Clinton's autobiography landed at bookstores this morning, and I joined the fray to grab a copy. While standing in line, with my copy obscured beneath this month's Wired Magazine cover story, I noticed many others in line purposefully searching through the pages. I watched as one lucky patron struck gold, and exclaimed a page number out loud. Everyone around me gasped and giggled as they made their way to the prescribed page. What had he found? Everyone else seemed to know but me, so I put the Wired under my arm and flipped to the noted page. What he had found was the beginning of Clinton's description of and apology for the events surrounding his past with Monica Lewinsky, where he apologizes to the reader for doing what he did, "Because I could."
Unlike many, who are appalled and devastated by such a confession, I'm immediately asking myself, what's the big deal? I had an extra cookie after lunch because I could. I wore the same socks three days in a row because I could. I bought a television as big as my refrigerator because I could. Few would argue that these behaviors are worth apologizing for. So I started thinking, where do we start to draw the line between "because I could" as an adequate justification and as a lousy defense?
Maybe it's about other people.
The optimist in me would like to believe that there's a message in Clinton's confession. He's taken the selfless stance to the extreme; leaving no room for justifications or excuses between him and his guilt. Perhaps he's saying to the reader, "There is no greater apology I can give, other than to say I didn't think about YOU when I lied to you." In making such a bold statement, I'd like to believe that there is also a challenge to the reader to think critically about the "because I could[s]" in our lives.
While the cookie and Clinton's lie are rather polar examples, what about some grayer areas in the middle? People buy SUV's because they can. People build gargantuan energy-sinking homes because they can. So what? An entire region of the world is destabilized and oppressed by our rabid consumption, our government has to fight a trade war, almost a thousand poor GI's have to die, and the executive branch has to create elaborate lies so that we can continue to believe it's about "terrorists" and not our lust for oil.
Maybe the things we do everyday, without thinking, are actually the most important ones to consider. Maybe most of our mistakes aren't malignant, but just happen because we don't think about their consequences. Maybe when we hurt each other, we never bothered to think about "each other" before the hurt happened. Maybe fashions, political, moral and physical, that are so easy to follow blindly, are the ones we should confront eyes wide open.
We live in a country where our current President has justifications for everything he does, and can't rightly think of a single thing he's done wrong while in office. Yet, I think we'll look back at George W. Bush as one of the greatest deceivers of all time. By accepting full responsibility, history will eventually forgive Clinton. For my part, I already have.