WORTH A THOUSAND MISTAKEN WORDS

Let me describe to you a recently published photo that appeared on various news outlets:

In the darkness, a figure is captured in an instant of dynamic motion:  legs braced, long hair flying wild, an extravagant plume of smoke and flames trailing from the incendiary object he is about to hurl into space.  His chest is covered by an American-flag T-shirt, he holds fire in one hand and a bag of chips in the other, a living collage of the grand and the bathetic.[1]

If you are an editor of a local newspaper and this picture comes to you through the wire service and it was taken on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, during the days of the recent civil disturbances, what are the chances you will run it?  After all, the disturbance is attracting a lot of attention; the picture is pretty much self-explanatory, and the image conveys meaningful information.  You might even run it on the first page, given it is dynamic – the description says it is – and it might sell some papers.  From just the description, can you think of a caption for it?  Well, here is one caption that was used by the Breitbart News:  “Rioters Throw Molotov Cocktails at Police in Ferguson – Again.”  Now does that caption affect how you see the described scene?  Does it taint your perspective?  Are you bolstered in your initial reaction of “I thought so”?  Now consider this other caption from the CBS St. Louis/Association Press:  “Protester Throws Tear-Gas Canister Back at Police While Holding Bag of Chips.”  How do you now see the scene?  The same?  I doubt it.  I tend to think the second caption is truer:  I just don’t see a rioter going about his business with a bag of chips in his hand – but that’s just me.  The point is that visual evidence can be highly misleading; one of these caption writers has it seriously wrong.  I’m sure there are some ulterior motives going on here, but even with those, if you reacted as I did in reading this account, your perceptions were highly influenced by the different takes the captions project.

Whether one caption is truer than the other, both sort of miss the point.  From all the recent incidents around the nation of cases of questionable police tactics, one thing stands out glaringly:  too many police forces are not genuinely federated – structurally and emotionally – with the communities they serve.  I don’t write this with much of an accusatory tone.  The fact that this is so is a prime consequence of what I have been claiming all along in this blog:  we are a nation imbued with a natural rights perspective, inclusive when it comes to our view of politics and governance.  From what we see, our police forces have been by and large seen as systems and a systems mentality has governed how we administer them.  By purely systems thinking – organized efforts to accomplish goals through the input-conversion-output logic which drains all subjective considerations – police forces are seen as so many figures, structures, and command chains.  Long gone is the cop on his walking beat knowing and commiserating with neighborhood bound, fellow citizens – the personal touch, if you will.  Today, police are subject to purely efficiency concerns:  how they decrease crime rates at the lowest cost.  I am not suggesting that all of that is not important, but we sacrificed a lot when that personal face was eliminated from the streets.  Throw in cultural prejudices that linger all too fervently among too many, and we have the level of indifference depicted in the videoed incidents that have sparked the recent disturbances.  I am not blaming all of this on the police.  When you constantly interact only with the criminal elements or the extreme hostilities that flare up among the citizens you deal with, you are bound to develop that thick, indifferent skin we see in too many policemen and women; hence, yet another reason to question this overall perspective and ask:  is that the construct that should guide what we teach in our civics classrooms?

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[1] Whitehead, C.  (2015).  What we don’t see.  The New York Times Magazine, May 31, pp. 13-15.  Citation on p. 14.  Meaning of the word bathetic is something that is unintentionally anti-climactic.

WHAT GOES ON THERE?

I have written of “rules of thumb” before.  I called them the product of heuristic thinking.  They are based on experience and, by and large, are usually true.  Here’s a rule of thumb, a prescriptive rule of thumb:  all non-profit organizations should have total transparency.  In order to get the tax benefits they enjoy, they should conduct their affairs totally in the open.  This goes for charities and community based efforts to improve local conditions and for churches.  And here’s a bit of further advice:  don’t give to any organization, no matter how beneficial its work might be, unless it has an open door policy as to its records and its communication.  The proviso is that such openness needs to respect the day-to-day practical demands of the organization’s operations; you wouldn’t be able to interfere with an activity simply because you need to see the previous day’s phone logs, for example.

As it is, there is little oversight of the operations.  Here is one account of the current conditions:

Last week federal authorities disclosed that four cancer charities had bilked tens of millions of dollars from donors.  Questions continue to surface about the lack of transparency at the Clinton Foundation.  Philanthropy, we’re learning, is a world with too much secrecy and too little oversight.  Despite its increasing role in American society, from education to the arts to the media, perhaps no sector is less accountable to outsiders.[1]

Solution?  Stop donating to organizations that don’t open up their records.  After all, these are not competitive businesses that have proprietary secrets concerning marketing strategies or product development.  They are organizations that might compete for donation dollars, but that sort of competition is not to bolster profits.  They are, instead, meant to help needy populations.  Openness, of course, would discourage if not make impossible mal accumulation from or spending of civic-minded contributors.  It would also discourage undue influence for political purposes that some donations might allow.  One gives a donation to someone’s foundations in hopes of incurring political favor.  Along with openness would be a prohibition of shell organizations that are set up to hide the identification of donors.

Now let me focus on the Catholic Church.  I am currently reading the accounts of the Vatican Bank in Rome.[2]  I will not make any accusations as to the intent of obvious abuses of the bank that stretch back to the 1970s.  That run of fraudulent activity that the Church’s bank was associated with could have been avoided if the Church’s dealings had been transparent.  The space here does not allow for a rundown of the felonious acts involved, but they are even linked to murders and suicides.  At best, church officials were incompetent in what they were doing, but even this could have been ferreted out if the Church had not been so secretive.  Adding to the interwoven nature of the illegal activities was the immunity the Church enjoys because the Vatican has sovereignty – it is an independent state.  Giving to the Church in Rome is like giving to the sovereign state of France or Switzerland.  One should ponder how healthy such giving is.  In any event, the Church’s “divine” mission was highly compromised by what eventually came to light as a result of the investigations that followed its financial activities of that era.

So a rule of thumb should be:  don’t give any donation to a non-profit organization that will not open up its books to the public.  Exception:  political parties and campaigns.  Why?  They are in competition and their strategies are compromised if they cannot maintain secrecy.  Also, donations to those organized entities are not tax deductible.  How about a list of their contributors, though?  Oh yeah; they should also be open to public inspection.

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[1] Callahan, D.  (2015).  Who will watch the charities?  The New York Times, May 31, (Sunday Review section), p. 4.

[2] Posner, G.  (2015).  God’s bankers:  A history of money and power at the Vatican.  New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster