“When you want to foster more responsible behavior in people, you can’t just legislate more rules and regulations,” said Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book “How.” “You have to enlist and inspire people in a set of values. People need to be governed both from the outside, through compliance with rules, and from the inside, inspired by shared values. That is why shame is so important. When we call a banker ‘a fat cat’ for taking too big a bonus, we’re actually being inspirational leaders because we are telling them, ‘You are behaving beneath how a responsible human being should behave.’ We need to inspire the village to shame those who betray our common values.”
I copied this from today’s New York Times, an article by Thomas Friedman, ‘Father Knows Best’. This refers to the Nigerian would be, could be bomber who’s father, a prominent banker, blew the whistle on his son. Much like the son who, in New Zealand has called for his father to face the truth and hand himself in to police after escaping jail.
From this article comes the concept that communities really are the begin all and end all of social behavior. What is acceptable in Featherston reflects the overall values of all Featherstonians.
“The men looked frightened. Taken in handcuffs after United States Marines found caches of Kalashnikovs, bomb-making material and opium during searches of their homes in a major offensive against the Taleban, their future looked bleak.
But just 48 hours later the prisoners were brought back to their village and freed into the care of local elders.
The extraordinary scene was one of the first examples of the new US policy of “reconciling” the Taleban being implemented.
It is modelled on how Sunni nationalist groups in Iraq (the so-called “Sunni Awakening”) were persuaded or induced to turn their backs on al Qaeda, an initiative now seen as a major turning-point in that war.”
This idea has, I believe, been used on occasions in New Zealand. It is an idea that, in retrospect, could have been used when my grape pickers came back at night and stole my possessions. Rather than being sent to jail, work of a restorative nature, working for the victims, that is me, with legal oversight and community involvement, seems to me to be a step in a change of direction. We find it too easy, I have found it too easy, to simply say “fuck you, you did the crime, now do the time”, many of these young men come from backgrounds of instability and we need to be cognizant of this fact, in fact by our silence over the years we have helped grow dysfunction. Yes, they all sound like trick words, dysfunction, denial and such but they are the words that best describe a reality we are so quick to dismiss, or in modern parlance, to ‘diss’.
Once more I bring it to the attention of our community leaders, our Mayors, our Councillors, our Police, the ‘Justice’ System and to community groups that tut tut those who step outside the law. The responsibility for a healthy, safe and vibrant community begins with me, with you, with all of us, it’s that simple and that difficult. Accepting that the system we have doesn’t work, with New Zealand having the second highest incarceration rate after the ‘big’ bad boy, America. We so like to point the finger, such an English trait, we so like to take no prisoners, a Scottish trait, that we have lost sight of our humanity and that for the lowest on the totem or even the highest who fall, we have no love or tolerance or even forgiveness. It is after all, human to err. We all fuck up at some point in our lives and it’s as though it was a game, to point at the Tiger Woods of the world as “Gotcha!”
I read the Times today and thought about it a great deal. For a Father to ‘dob’ in his son truly takes courage and a commitment to change. Someone has finally said “Stop, enough”.
Food for thought as we enter a new decade.
