Remorse, and the time I framed someone for a crime

How regret, remorse, and conscience work

Once, I set a person up for a crime he didn’t commit. Literally.

Admittedly, I was 5. But it still counts.

The cul-de-sac gang was playing hide and seek at our neighbor friends’ house… and my target was the cool ringleader, 11-year-old Jason. He was a boisterous kid, bit of a troublemaker, teller of “inappropriate” jokes. He even swore. And, worst for me, he constantly made fun of us little kids. I was the youngest.

He belittled me somehow that afternoon, I don’t remember how, and I decided it was time. I’d get back at him. I checked to make sure no one was around, found a stick, then dragged its tip carefully stick through the mud. I wrote A-S-S clear as day, then followed it with a big zero. Stashing the stick, I yelled out to the scattered masses, “Come look what I found! Look what Jason did!”

Come they did, and immediately; who wouldn’t? I showed them the markings. “He wrote asshole in the dirt!” I proclaimed. They were predictably shocked and outraged. No one suspected me, or believed Jason’s protests that he hadn’t done it. Parents were told. Jason was duly reprimanded and shamed. My plan had worked.

Also: I felt terrible. I told no one – not till years later. But the memory is among the clearest I have from my young childhood.

It was one of my first experiences with regret and remorse. Regret is sadness or disappointment about how things turned out, but it doesn’t necessarily involve your actions. “I regret that rain canceled the outing.” Remorse is different though; it comes when you do something wrong. It’s wishing you didn’t do the thing you did – or wishing you did the thing you should have done but didn’t.

I wished I hadn’t done to Jason what I did.

Regret and remorse are great teachers, which is what makes them so interesting. They teach us better than a scolding ever could.

When we experience regret, we realize that there are goods out there that we could have attained but didn’t. When weather cancel plans your outing with friends, you regret it because you care about friendship and them. You feel the loss of a good.

When we experience remorse, we realize that do know what’s good to do, even when we don’t do it. My framing Jason for crimes of vulgarity and (soft) vandalism and lying about it were acts against the goods of truth and justice. I’d rationalized to myself that he deserved it for all his misdeeds, but there I just lied to myself, a further violation against truth (as lying to ourselves always is).

What is good to do, ultimately, is written on the human heart. We know the goods – and that they’re objective, not subject to reconfiguring. They hold.

Conscience is the vehicle, unique to humans, that calls forth remorse. It alerts us that we’ve acted against the good. Conscience “happens” in all three aspects of our humanness, to varying degrees –our emotions (guilt feelings), our thoughts (ruminating, remembering the incident decades later), and our body (couldn’t sleep that night).

And conscience is a gift that can point us toward flourishing. We can learn from our remorse, and sometimes our regret, about what’s good and not – and change course for next time. It’s a gift when it works… but we must take care because it can stop working properly. It does its job at first, but if we persist in our (against-the-good) ways, conscience deforms or fizzles. We can talk ourselves out of remorse, steel ourselves against it. We rationalize that our actions are fine. When we do this we break the tools of our reasoning – we make up our own reason, a pretender that lies and flatters us. We grow in vice and become vice-filled, literally vicious, people.

Vice destroys, and vicious people don’t flourish. I don’t know what happened to Jason – we moved away a year later – but I hope he confronted the ways he was acting against the good, and stopped. I hope a life of vice wasn’t his path. And what about me – my response to the vices I committed? I did let remorse be my guide… and never framed Jason again, or anyone else. I’ve taken other actions against the good (as recently as this morning – and I bet you have too) but not that one.

Here’s to learning aright when we experience regret and remorse, to heeding conscience and its lessons. And here’s to continuing to choose for the good.