We’ve all had one. That moment you wish you could take back. Maybe you were impatient with your child, a colleague, or a loved one. Perhaps you laughed at someone’s expense. Or uncorked some profanity in an inappropriate situation.
You know why you did it. You were tired, you had had enough, you weren’t really thinking, you had a few drinks, you were just careless. You thought you were safe.
There’s nothing new about the one bad moment. What’s new is the omnipresence of recording devices and ways to share digital information. So today, your own bad moment can become permanently attached to you. It can go viral. And so, despite a lifetime of almost always doing the right thing, this one bad moment becomes the stain that never goes away.
Actor Christian Bale exploded on the set of Terminator 4, and his tirade has gone viral. The rant occurred in front of a small audience. But the recording has been shared millions of times. On YouTube, you can hear mashups of the rant with dance music and Dora the Explorer. There are currently about 40 videos featuring the profanity-laced rant. One has more than 2,320,000 page views.
“Christian Bale? Isn’t he that spoiled hothead? Oh, and I think he acted in some movies, too.”
Bale is not alone. Michael Richards had his bad moment. So did Michael Phelps. The pace of these moments seems to be accelerating. A-Rod lies about steroid use. Chris Brown may have assaulted his girlfriend, pop star Rihanna. Squeaky-clean Disney actress/singer Miley Cyrus appears to mock Asians. And that’s just from the past few days!
So please, be careful out there. And more importantly: be good. It is true: your true character is revealed by your behavior when you think no one is watching.
A more difficult issue that deserves further discussion: forgiveness. As a culture, how can we forgive people that we really don’t know? The viral qualities of a bad moment are far more powerful than those of atonement.