And Kavanaugh doesn’t seem to have done any thinking at all. So let’s imagine he were to say something like this: I’m not proud of everything I did when I was young; I doubt any of us are. But growing up means learning from our mistakes, in part so we can help our children grow into responsible adults. When I look back now I realize that my friends and I reveled in our own privilege — we were male, white, rich, and destined to have limitless opportunities laid before us. We drank too much. We treated the young women we knew like objects, or potential conquests, or the butt of jokes. We certainly didn’t empathize with them. If we had, we would have understood how our own behavior made them feel; how it could make them feel vulnerable, degraded, even victimized. We would have understood that those feelings can stay with a person for life, and be a source of pain and anguish, even if you were never the victim of a crime. We can look back now and say that we can’t expect that kind of empathy from a teenager. But it’s exactly what we should expect. Even if we weren’t capable of it then, today’s teenagers can be, if we use our own failings to teach them to be better than we were. That’s what I’ve tried to do as an adult.