Copyright © 2022, Jonathan Goldin
In Showtime’s Season Three, Episode Seven, City on a Hill, there’s a very brief and startling event that seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the third season plot and theme.
The former non-corrupt police detective, Chris Kaysen, played by Matthew del Negro has now switched to the DA’s office. He becomes a close confidant of the Assistant District Attorney, DeCoursy Ward, played by Aldis Hodge.
Kaysen has a sixteen year old son, Aidan, a good kid, who was arrested one Saturday night for brawl in a barroom, entered underage, and possibly damaging his future plans, and so forth.
A.D.A. DeCourcy decides to intervene on behalf of his buddy Kaysen; to give Aidan a lesson called Life 101.
In dramatic police methodology, two cops in a cruiser suddenly accost the Aidan walking home peacefully with his High School buddies. With no explanation or apology, speaking to him as though he was actually being arrested, they grab him and throw him into the back of the cruiser.
The boy is shocked and protesting but they ignore him and head back to Police Headquarters. He’s marched into an office where A.D.A. DeCoursy Ward is
standing and invites Aidan to sit on the coach and then joins him.
“I know you are. You’re a friend of my dad. What am I here for?”
“Your father is a good man. He doesn’t want his son to ruin his future.”
“What does Dad say about me.”
“That he loves you.”
“I love him, but I don’t like him because he don’t like me.”
“I’ve not had a son but I was a son and only until the end
Of his life did we start to go halfway.”
“No wonder he likes you. You talk as much bullshit as he does.”
That’s the central message, and later there’s some reconciliation between Aidan and his dad.
What was breathtaking for me, viewing this scene, is that replicates exactly what I’ve coined as “an Uncle Sal intervention”, named after a fictional Italian American from Brooklyn, who has become my alter ego. Sal has chutzpah in spades, instinctive street smarts, and whimsical humor. His MO is to reconcile children and parents. If he witnesses rude, obnoxious, or insensitive behavior by a kid to his or her parents, or vice versa, he doesn’t hesitate to take a kid or parent to task.
“It takes a village to raise a child’, but where in the hell is ‘the village’?”
Time to retire that cliché, along with, “We’re all in this together.”
There’s a desperate need for thousands of more Uncle Sal’s in our culture.
The reality of someome actually caring about family conflicts in someone else’s family, and having the courage to intervene, was already in major retreat in my Baby Boom generation.
It’s been even more starved in subsequent generations. This pervasive deficit perfectly illustrates that the slogan, “It takes a village” is a sham