A refrain I’ve heard repeated in response to the Covington Catholic video last weekend: boys will be boys.
First it was spit with derision. Boys will be boys.
Then it was intoned as explanation. Boys. Will. Be. Boys.
Videos of my teenage boy self and his fellows are playing in my memory, trying to sort it all out. In one, we’re a couple of months post graduation, drinking and smoking up in a Phoenix hotel room with total strangers, dealers some of us met on the street and invited back to the room to play video games. We are loud, out of control, drunk on cheap beer and the abominable absence of adult supervision. We are a scourge.
Boys will be boys.
In another, my four best friends and I are careening around downtown Denver, running down alleys, climbing statues, ducking into doors left open. Alcohol free, drug free, powered by the communion we feel with and for one another, for this city, for these strangers we are high five-ing up and down 16th Street. We are young and alive and enthralled by possibility. We love everyone.
Boys will be boys.
A lot depends on how you say it.
YoRocko! 
The comparison you offer is a powerful one, Rocky. I feel blessed to have had more contact with the second type than the first. But you’re right, so much depends on how it’s said (or read).