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Compassion For Jon Cruz

The coach of my old high school debate program is accused of soliciting nude photos from teenagers.
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Between a family vacation, a new feature film I’ve been involved with, and the Passover holiday, I’m afraid life has kept me away from my computer. Not so much that I haven’t kept somewhat abreast of the news – but honestly, where do we get this notion that the news has anything to do with us?

Well, every now and again it does, and it can be a real punch in the gut. I got one of those recently when I learned that the coach of my old high school debate team was arrested for soliciting teenage boys to send him nude photos.

Regular readers of this blog know how much competitive high school debate meant to me. I didn’t know Jon Cruz particularly well personally, but I knew how well he was regarded by his predecessor coaches and by his students. While the Times substantially exaggerates his role in building up the program – my old coach, Richard Sodikow, founded the program and built it into a national powerhouse; Cruz came along much later, and only seemed so tall because he stood on that giant’s shoulders – it’s still true that Cruz was felt by everyone to be an exceptionally good advocate for the program, a dynamic and tireless leader of a program that needed such a leader to return it to its glory days. And he clearly loved the kids. Which makes it especially painful to learn that “love” turns out to not be quite the right word.

A lot of my fellow alumni, when they read or heard the story, were immediately angry – at the betrayal of trust, at the potential damage to the program, at the threat to “our” kids. I admit, my initial reaction was sadness. Cruz confessed immediately upon being arrested, and to me that read like a sign of a man who had been hoping to be caught, hoping to be stopped. It made me think of this article about a teenage pedophile who had never abused a child and wanted never to do so, and who set out to help himself and others by providing support for those with a similar orientation who wanted to avoid doing harm, and how unlikely it is that anyone with such inclinations will get help, until its too late and he’s in the hands of the criminal justice system. And what a sad shame that is.

The anger came eventually, as I thought more about why he might have sought out the job he did, becoming a teacher, becoming a debate coach, putting himself in proximity to potential victims (and, perhaps more to the point, potential “beards” to help him pose as a teenager online; Cruz did not solicit any students at the school he taught at, so far as we know). He might have done so consciously, which paints him in a much more sinister light than if I imagine he sought consciously to satisfy his affinity for teenagers in a healthy way, all the while carrying this darker secret. Regardless, the betrayal is profound. Cruz didn’t just betray those who hired him, praised him, gave him responsibility; nor those he had in his charge. He betrayed every future teacher who displays similar enthusiasm and tender concern for their students, and then faces suspicion because of it. He betrayed every future student who will miss out on a level of trust that they deserve to experience. He made the world a colder place for those who will never even know his name.

But even in that anger, I find myself thinking of Cruz primarily with compassion and sadness. This is a man who could have been – by all accounts, was – a great teacher, someone who really made a difference in young lives. We kid ourselves if we think the people who can do this generally have entirely unmixed motives. As I mentioned in my eulogy for my beloved high school debate coach, a lot of people who are exceptionally good at working with adolescents have something of an arrested adolescent about them. In my late coach’s case, he was too emotionally bound up in our lives; he lived too much through us. He lacked an adult’s emotional detachment. In Cruz’s case, well, it looks like that feeling was bound up with a sexual fetish that he either couldn’t or didn’t want to keep under control. That failure of his is now likely to send him to prison for many years, and to brand him with a stigma which he will never escape.

And – at the risk of being badly misunderstood – I want to point out that it will send him to prison for behaving like a teenager. Teenagers solicit nude photos of each other; teenagers manipulate each other; teenagers torture each other emotionally, sometimes to the point of serious anxiety and depression. I’m not saying this to exonerate Cruz – there’s very good reason what he is accused of is illegal, and I’m not really interested right now in whether justice should be tempered with mercy. I’m saying this so that we see the person past the pathology – or, perhaps, so that we see the pathology for what it is, a humanly comprehensible thing. I’m saying that justice should be administered with compassion.

The wheels of justice will now turn in their due course, and turn they should. I hope that wherever justice sends him, Jon Cruz finds someone who can help him to a better self-understanding, and a way to continue living without doing what I suspect he always knew was real harm. Unfortunately, I doubt he will.

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