After the games party (see previous post), several of us sat around eating pizza and discussing the Boy Scout perversion files and the Sandusky trial. The kids had left the room in case you were worried.

What we were really talking about was moral fortitude. If you saw something wrong, would you speak up? We all think we would, but we've all read too many instances of normal, even good, people doing the wrong thing--the Milgram experiment, Genovese attack, the Stanford prison experiment--to be able to say with absolute certainty that we would be the one strong enough to speak up despite the consequences.

My sister brought up another angle to this issue. She said many of don't even get to the point where we have to decide whether we are going to turn in the bad guy for doing the bad thing; we just convince ourselves we didn't see anything bad. It rang a bell for me. I suddenly thought, I've done this recently. I've seen something and pretended it wasn't a problem. But, I couldn't quite catch what it was.

And then, in the middle of the night, I woke straight up, having caught it. I realized that one of my tutees was giving warning signals of an eating disorder. I had heard her say she was skipping breakfast and lunch, losing 5 pounds in a week, not needing to eat before late afternoon, but I thought how silly she was paying me all this money to study together when she didn't have the fuel to learn. I told her that, but I didn't think that she might be in danger, at least not consciously. I must have been telling myself I wasn't seeing what I was seeing.

Then I didn't know what to do. Talk to her? Talk to her advisor? her parents? I found a natural place in the conversation to bring it up today, and I did. She assured me she was fine--that she was eating fruit for breakfast and lunch late, after our meetings. She told me she counseled peers who had eating disorders and was very aware of the issues.

So, maybe I actually jumped to the wrong conclusion, but I'd rather embarrass myself and her a bit than have missed it. And maybe I'm still right, and I need to keep my eyes open.