DW's Blog

The New A

by DW Green — April 8, 2026

“The Scarlet Letter Never Left — It Just Found a Bigger Stage”

“On one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush… It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

— • —

I read The Scarlet Letter in junior high school and didn’t much care for it. Not because it was badly written — it wasn’t. But because something about it made me deeply uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t yet name.

I can name it now. What bothered me was the crowd.

Hester Prynne commits adultery in 17th-century Puritan Boston. Her punishment: stand on the scaffold in public view and wear a red letter A on her chest for the rest of her life. Not prison. Not quiet consequence. Public, permanent, visible shame. The community gathers to watch. To judge. To make her carry their discomfort so they don’t have to.

I was thirteen. I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was sensing. But the instinct was sound: shaming people in public for their private behavior choices is way out of bounds. It was out of bounds in 1642. It was out of bounds in 1850 when Hawthorne wrote about it. And it is spectacularly, globally, digitally out of bounds in 2026.

THE LETTER NEVER LEFT. IT JUST FOUND A BIGGER STAGE.

WHAT HAWTHORNE KNEW

Hawthorne wasn’t writing a romance. He was writing a warning. Born into a family with direct roots in the Salem witch trials — his own ancestor a judge — he understood from the inside how communities use public shame not to correct behavior, but to consolidate power. To draw a line between the acceptable and the cast-out. To make the crowd feel righteous by making one person feel small.

The scarlet letter isn’t primarily about Hester’s sin. It’s about what the community needs her sin to mean. She becomes a symbol — not a person. And once you’re a symbol, your actual humanity is beside the point. The crowd isn’t looking at you anymore. They’re looking at the letter.

SOUND FAMILIAR?

THE LETTER MIGRATED

The town square became Twitter. The scaffold became a screenshot. The crowd of Puritan neighbors became millions of strangers, each with a share button and a clean conscience about using it.

The architecture is identical. Someone is identified as having violated a community norm. The violation is made public — often stripped of context, often amplified beyond recognition. The crowd gathers. The pile-on begins. And the person at the center stops being a human being with a history and a complexity and becomes, simply, the letter they’ve been assigned.

Three recent examples. Three different crowds. Three different letters. One identical impulse.

In early 2026, Chicago Bulls guard Jaden Ivey posted a lengthy video on social media expressing his religious views, including anti-gay sentiments regarding NBA Pride month. Within hours — not days, hours — he was waived. Conduct detrimental to the team, the organization said. No conversation reported. No mediation offered. No redemption arc considered. Just the machinery of consequence moving at the speed of a news cycle. Whatever was in Ivey’s heart — sincere faith, poor judgment, a twenty-three-year-old man still forming his views — none of it had time to matter. The letter landed before the video finished loading.

Then there is Iryna Zarutska. She was twenty-three years old, a Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion and come to America for a better life. In August 2025 she was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack while riding a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina. An artist named Ian Gaudreau, moved by her story, began painting a memorial mural on the exterior wall of The Dark Lady — a beloved LGBTQ club in downtown Providence, Rhode Island — whose Democratic owners had welcomed the tribute. The club’s owners later felt the need to issue a public statement clarifying that they were Democrats who did not support Trump — as though their political credentials were required before a murdered woman’s face could be permitted on their wall.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley called the mural divisive and misguided, saying it did not reflect local values. Community members demanded its removal. The artist became the story. The murdered woman receded. The mural came down. One resident put it plainly: “Providence had a George Floyd mural and nobody called it divisive.” The letter, it turns out, is only acceptable when the right crowd approves the ink.

And then there is Tiger Woods. A global icon whose private life collapsed publicly and catastrophically — infidelity, addiction, accidents, the full inventory of human wreckage. Here the underlying behavior genuinely warranted consequence. Real people were genuinely harmed. Accountability was not only appropriate but necessary. And yet even here the honest question must be asked: did the years-long global feast on his humiliation serve justice — or did it serve the crowd? The gleeful, relentless, worldwide public feast on his unraveling? That served something else entirely.

Three letters. The first pinned on a young man’s faith. The second pinned on an artist’s act of grief — and on a gay bar full of Democrats for daring to honor the wrong victim. The third pinned by everyone, everywhere, on a man whose behavior genuinely warranted scrutiny. The content of the transgression changes completely depending on who’s holding the pen. But the act — the public branding, the crowd gathering, the reduction of a person to a symbol — that part is perfectly consistent across all of them.

THE LETTER CHANGES — THE IMPULSE DOESN’T

In Puritan Boston, there was one set of moral authorities deciding what the letter stood for. Today, every tribe has its own alphabet. The right assigns letters for wrong political opinions. The left assigns them for wrong political opinions. Corporations assign them to protect their brand. Anonymous accounts assign them for sport.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS NEW. THE DOPAMINE HIT OF COLLECTIVE JUDGMENT IS ANCIENT.

What the crowd always needs, in every era, is someone to carry the weight of their own unexamined fears and failures. The person on the scaffold isn’t just being punished. They’re being used. They’re holding something the crowd doesn’t want to hold about itself.

Hawthorne knew this. He named it in 1850. We haven’t gotten the memo.

WHAT THE LETTER COSTS THE ONE WHO PINS IT

This is the part junior-high-school me felt but couldn’t articulate.

The act of publicly shaming someone does something to the shamer. It feels like justice. It feels like moral clarity. It feels, for a moment, like being on the right side of something large and important.

But what it actually does is harden the heart.

The moment you reduce another human being to their worst moment — their worst tweet, their worst decision, their worst day — you practice a kind of cruelty that becomes easier each time. The crowd that gathers to shame doesn’t disperse more compassionate. It disperses more certain of its own righteousness. And righteousness, when it goes unexamined, is among the most dangerous things a human being can carry.

Roger Chillingworth, the true villain of Hawthorne’s novel, isn’t the man who committed adultery. It’s the man who devoted his life to destroying the one who did. His obsession with punishment hollowed him out. He became, Hawthorne writes, something not quite human anymore.

THE LETTER BURNS BOTH WAYS.

THE ROSE AT THE THRESHOLD

Hawthorne opens his novel with a strange and beautiful image: a wild rose-bush growing right at the door of the prison. He doesn’t explain it. He just leaves it there — beauty at the entrance to punishment, life insisting on itself next to the machinery of judgment.

I think that rose is the human capacity for mercy. It grows wild. It doesn’t ask permission. It shows up exactly where you’d least expect it — at the threshold of the darkest institutions we build.

And it is, in 2026, the most countercultural act available to us.

Not to excuse the genuinely harmful. Not to pretend that behavior has no consequences. But to insist — quietly, stubbornly, at every threshold — that a person is more than their worst moment. That complexity is not weakness. That the crowd’s certainty is not the same thing as truth. That redemption is not a naive idea but a deeply human necessity.

The Pathless Path asks us to stay soft in a world that keeps handing us letters to pin on each other.

PUT DOWN THE LETTER. LOOK AT THE PERSON.

The rose is still there. It’s always been there. It was there in Puritan Boston, and it is there now, growing wild and unbothered at the door of every prison we build — including the ones we carry inside us.

— • —

A softer heart receives what a defended one deflects.

Always NOW. Always ON. Always US.

The letter was never ours to give.