Gimme 20

The buzzphrase this week is "20 minutes of action."

What exactly is the significance of 20 minutes in our lives?  Off the top of my perennially shallow head, that's a third of the time it takes me to compose a column for this paper.  That actually means I don't get any action for triple that length. Which, I would guess, is good, because I'm also not getting into trouble.

For other people?  Twenty minutes is a lifetime. A rape victim, for example.

Yet "20 minutes of action" was how a rape was diminished into horrible insignificance by the father of a rapist.  This was meant to be a defense of the rapist, an appeal to the emotions of a judge.  Perhaps a father cannot be faulted for trying to protect and defend his child.  But that parental instinct backfired the minute the father reduced the rape into a matter of the time it took to commit it.

See, in his letter to the judge, the father asked his honor to think about the many years that his young son – a promising athlete, an Ivy Leaguer, blah blahblah– could possibly spend in that yucky place called jail.  Then, papa asked the judge to compare that interminable stretch of time with the brief sexual fun (all of just 20 minutes!) that his stud of a son was able to enjoy from an inebriated woman. (Who didn't know what was happening to her, anyway?)

Some people (including, certainly, the father of the rapist) may be wondering what the big deal was about this buzzphrase.  Well, I would assume he must have been totally clueless about how revealing this was.  But it showed the world how completely screwed up his perspective was.

That dismissive tactic essentially disregarded what had happened to the woman. It ignored the violation of the law. It ignored the violation of her body.  More importantly, it revealed to the world the values of the father, which probably translated to the values that his son, the convicted rapist, inherited from him.

It gives us possible clues as to why the son disrespected the woman at the time she was drunk. It might lead us to think he was probably not contrite about his actions.  If father thinks it, son must too.  And coming from where he was, it probably sounded good to his ears.  After all, it's only 20 minutes that the woman had to endure the molestation of her body, right?

But 20 minutes is plenty.  It can mean the difference between a person who chooses good over evil.  It can mean a person pausing from his daily routine to help save another person's life.  To jump in a pool and save a drowning person.

It can mean a phone call to express love for a special one.  It can mean an apology, to soothe troubled relations, and avoid a lifetime of misunderstanding and hate.

It can mean getting to the client's office to make a pitch and clinching the deal, or losing to a rival who was there on time.

As in this case, it's enough to demonstrate to the world a person's true character, the very fiber of his being.  It proves that given 20 minutes alone with a stone drunk female, that person would exercise his choice to disregard the laws of man and the rules of human decency, take her clothes off and have his way with her.  It is an indictment of his humanity.

That, sir, is the meaning of 20 minutes of action.