I’ve spent too much time the past few days reading about the horrible crimes committed at Penn State, both by the perpetrator and those who shielded them. Horrible, horrible stuff, and agree with the sentiment here that there’s plenty of blame to go around. What I’ve been pondering most though is the failure of so many supposedly decent people to take action, and then yesterday reading I came across a quote in a completely different context that made me see a bit of a parallel.
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First of all, I want to make as clear as I can that I am not drawing any equivalencies whatsoever on the crime itself. Nothing is equivalent to raping a child. What I’m thinking more about is the actions of those who knew or suspected the crimes, but chose to look the other way.
I read the Sandusky indictment yesterday, because I’m a source document kind of gal, and was especially struck by the story of the janitor who saw an adult and a boy engaged in horribly inappropriate sexual behavior.
http://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/...
The indictment describes how the janitor told his friends, that he was weeping, swearing, distraught. He should have called the police, he truly should have. But he didn’t. He feared for his job, he was scared. He told his supervisor, but he failed to do all he could and should have done. Yet reading the indictment it is hard not to have a measure of sympathy for that janitor.
I have less sympathy for Paterno. Those at the top should be held more accountable. People in positions of power have responsibility not to look the other way and to create an environment where bad news can be safely reported.
What I’m thinking about though is how people look the other way all the time on all sorts of things. As they say, “denial is not just a river in Egypt.” And it seems like in almost always when bad news is reported up the chain of command it is whitewashed and minimized, and with each step the horror gets diluted. That’s how bureaucracies work. That might be how human nature works.
I was thinking about this because soon after reading about Penn State I was reading, “Which Bank is the Worst?” by Gary Rivlin. http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
First I came across this quote in the section on JP MorganChase:
“. . . Months before Madoff’s fraud was exposed, an officer in the bank wrote an email to colleagues reporting that another bank executive ‘just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.’ The bank, the suit contends, had withdrawn all but $35 million of the $276 million it had invested in Madoff-linked hedge funds by the time the fraud was revealed.”
Here’s the bit about Well’s Fargo:
“Another whistleblower, Camille Thomas, who reviewed loan papers at four Well Fargo offices in the Memphis area between 2004 and 2008, said in an affidavit she gave last year, ‘It was generally assumed that African-American customers were less sophisticated and intelligent and could be manipulated more easily into subprime loans.’ Elderly blacks who were house rich but cash poor were particularly prized, given the profits the bank could make bamboozling them to refinance with a high-fee, high-interest loan crammed with expensive extras.”
So, stop me if you’ve heard this before, but all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. The personal effects of Sandusky’s crimes are more horrendous for individuals, and we respond to them – as we should – with visceral disgust. But the societal impacts may have been greater with the bankers actions.
This event highlights to me something about society that is wrong, the slow leaning toward a libertarian “everyone for themselves” attitude. There often seems more of an emphasis on plausible deniability and CYA than on doing what is morally right. As Democrats, the party that believes we should all look out for each other, we’re shocked to see that there are individuals that would look the other way when they knew a cover up was going on. But in fact that has been happening all over. Maybe this is a watershed moment to say that not just in the worst situations, but always, adults should have the moral clarity to do more than the minimum.