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CounterPunch
January
22, 2003
"Why Are So
Many of Your Heros Assassinated?"
Whistleblowers
and Team Players
By RICHARD THIEME
It was only after whistleblowers came out of the
closet during the Great Deflation that Time Magazine honored
the practice of what team players call "ratting out your
pals." Conservative magazines like Time may give lip service
to whistleblowing in the abstract but never champion whistle
blowers until after they have sung. Instead they support the
conditions and practices which make whistleblowers a threat in
the first place.
Whistleblowers are a reminder that ethics
must be embodied in real flesh-and-blood human beings who put
themselves on the line. Unless our deeper beliefs and values
become flesh, they are words words words designed to make us
feel better, rationalize misdeeds, and send distracting pangs
of conscience straight into space.
If you have never known a real flesh-and-blood
whistleblower, see the film "The Insider" for a good
portrait. The film confirms the conclusion of a Washington law
firm specializing in whistleblower cases that lists motivations
for whistleblowing money, anger and resentment, revenge, justice
and eliminates all but one as sufficient to carry a whistleblower
through the abuse they will face. Only acting from a pained conscience
will sustain a whistleblower through the ordeal.
During a recent speech for accountants
about ethics, our Q&A moved quickly into the gray areas where
accountants spend much of their time. Outsiders think accountants
live in a black and white grid with simple answers but in fact
they wade through a swamp of maybe this or maybe that.
Accountants are paid whistleblowers.
Accountants are intended to be in the corporate culture but not
of it, to use company books like mirrors to reveal the truth
and consequences of choices. That's why it is so difficult to
do the job right.
The tension comes from the fact that
only an individual can have a conscience. An institution or organization
can develop a culture that supports doing the right thing only
when a leader pursues that objective with single-minded intensity.
Left to themselves, all cultures are based on survival, not telling
the truth. Cultures reward team players, not whistleblowers.
In all my years as a teacher, priest, speaker and consultant,
I have never seen a culture with a conscience.
A cop friend reminds me that the first
time a rookie cop sees his partners beat someone up in an alley
or notices that money or cocaine doesn't always get back to the
station, he is closely watched. The word goes out quickly that
"he's OK" or "watch out for him." Those that
are OK move up. The cop is a practicing Roman Catholic and noted
that recent scandals in the church are symptoms of the same dynamics.
Institutions usually encourage disclosure
only when it no longer matters. Operation Northwoods the desire
by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 to eliminate Fidel Castro
by sinking refugee boats from Cuba, attacking our own base at
Guantanamo, and planting terror bombs in American cities was
revealed by James Bamford in his book "Body of Secrets,"
but nary a peep of outrage greeted revelation of the treasonous
scheme. When the Church apologized to Galileo for torturing him
four hundred years after the fact, it raised the question of
how an institution had so lost its moorings that someone might
think an absurd gesture like that had meaning.
In Wisconsin a friend was nominated to
head an arts board at the state level. His work on behalf of
the party in power and his passion for art collecting made him
a natural but he was passed over. I asked a confidante of then-governor
Tommy Thompson why.
"He's not a team player," he
said. "He isn't predictable."
The guy who told me this was a team player.
He was faithful and steady and worked tirelessly to raise money
for the party. When friends were "naughty," as he called
it, he looked the other way. He called recently to tell me he
was now a million dollars richer, having been compensated at
that level for three years on the board of an energy firm. He
had been recommended for the position by his friend, now-Secretary
Tommy Thompson.
Thus has it always been. Thus will it
ever be.
Why are so many of your heroes, I was
asked, people who were assassinated? Why do names like Jesus,
Lincoln, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. keep showing up
in your conversation?
I think it's because they embody what
it takes to make a stand on behalf of the truth. They were all
human but found the courage to blow the whistle on the cultures
of death our institutions create. Their reward was getting whacked.
Make no mistake, those who articulate
or embody an upward call always inspire ambivalence. A disciple
of Gandhi said that even those who loved him most were secretly
relieved when he was murdered because for the moment the pressure
was off. Jesus as icon is malleable in the hands of his institutional
custodians whereas Jesus the Jew in the street was a real pain.
In an era characterized by increasing
secrecy by the government and the gradual but progressive surrender
of our rights, it's only a matter of time until some malevolent
design ripens and bursts into the sunlight because some whistleblower
just can't stand it another minute. Some team player, their motives
mixed but their conscience pricked, will tell the truth. That's
the only way to have accountability when those with power and
privilege remove transparency from the processes of government
and business.
When a mainstream Midwest woman asks
how she will tell her grandchildren what America was like before
the Great Change, how she will explain openness and disclosure,
the Freedom of Information Act, guarantees in the Bill of Rights
then I know that we don't need a weatherman to know the direction
of the wind and see the firestorm on the horizon. Signs of the
times grow on trees like low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking.
We are all team players, all of us some
of the time, some of us all of the time, but we each have our
own particular crossroads where we must decide if our words will
become flesh. It is never easy and there are always consequences.
Only integrity will see us through to the bitter end and none
of us really know if we have it until it is tested.
Richard Thieme
speaks, writes and consults on the human dimensions of life and
work, the impact of technology, and "life on the edge."
He can be reached at: rthieme@thiemeworks.com
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