English Audio Request

The Death of Common Sense
It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday in January, and the Davis home is a thoroughfare. Every five minutes, someone walks through the front door: a young Chinese woman who lives with the Davises while she spends the year teaching, several employees of the Davises’ large farms. Betty pours a cola in the kitchen beneath a plaque on the stove hood that reads, “Be still, and know that I am God,” before joining her husband at the dining table.
“The reason we’re sitting here is we’re hoping we can help somebody else through this,” says Bill, his overalls filled by a stout belly. “The girl moved to our school that year; she had been homeschooled up until then. Obviously, she was trying to fit in somehow, and she sent a picture to my son, and he asked for more.” He looks to Betty. “In our eyes, that’s fairly normal.”
Not that they were sanguine about it. “The last thing Alex wants to do is disappoint us, and he knew at that point, he had,” Betty says. “And the parents wanted some type of a punishment for the embarrassment.”
“If I were in their shoes, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the same thing,” Bill says, adding that, while he and Betty had never met Laurie or her folks, “I’m sure they’re a great family.”
What might have been settled quickly between the families—with apologies, or confiscation of cell phones, or a smack upside the head and the words, “What’s wrong with you?”—instead became a prolonged and anxiety-ridden ordeal. Bill and Betty worked assiduously to contain the damage and did everything Splain, their attorney, told them to do. They agreed to pay if Laurie needed counseling, for instance, a recollection that causes Betty to widen her eyes in incredulity. They took Alex to a sex counselor, a $350 meeting that ended with the counselor telling Betty what she already knew: “There’s no sex problem with your son.”