[Grovenet] What Value Honesty?

[allnutt]

It is an interesting question as well as a legitimate one.

I worry sometimes about our reputation in the world and your comment about 
whether 'all' of the people in Cuba are criminals is a good one.  There was 
a report about one of the people that was let go after he had been held for 
several years.  It seems that when the Americans offered a $500 reward for 
turning in Afghan fighters a man decided to turn in his son in law for the 
reward, even though his son in law was a goat herder.  The man figured it 
wouldn't take long for the US to determine a goat herder wasn't worth much, 
they would let the son in law go and the man would have $500.  The man was 
sorry because his family was unhappy that the son in law was gone for so 
many years and they suffered from his absence.  So, I got to wondering does 
this Afghani family think that the US is a smart nation?  If it takes us 
years to figure out that a man is a goat herder how smart are our 
intelligence sources?  And how wise are  we in our use of resources?  First 
we pay $500 for an innocent goat herder, then we spend more money guarding 
him and feeding him and housing him and using our personnel to interrogate 
him for years and years. We finally let him go because he is after all just 
a goat herder. How much money did we spend and what was our reward for 
holding him?  He had no intelligence that would keep us safer and we spent a 
lot of money.  We likely interrogated him with techniques that caused pain 
just short of organ failure or death.  The goat herder probably thought we 
tortured him though by Gonzales definition we did not. After all he is just 
a stupid goat herder who wouldn't understand such fine and technical 
distinctions and we are the mighty and powerful and 'smart' US.  Aren't we? 
The goat herder and his father in law would likely agree that we are mighty 
and powerful but I have a sneaky feeling they aren't too impressed with how 
smart we are.

For President's Day just a few weeks ago several media stories brought up 
the subject of George Washington and how he treated prisoners of war.  He 
figured that if our country was going to be built on the principle that 
people had inalienable rights then we should practice them from the 
beginning. The reports were how the mercenaries that the British hired to 
fight us were so impressed with the philosophy that they stayed on in the US 
when we released them and that they had been 'converted' to the American way 
of life.   The foundation that George Washington built upon was consistent 
with what we said we were all about.

The contrast in what we are doing now versus what we were doing then is 
astonishing.  And just like you are wondering about the value of honesty and 
wishing for more valuable things to wind up in the lost and found, I was 
wishing that we had more Afghani goat herders who had an experience that 
would lead them to understand deep in their souls what it means to have some 
inalienable rights as a human being.

Katie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron D'Eau Claire" <rondec at easystreet.com>
To: "'Forest Grove local interests list'" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:42 PM
Subject: [Grovenet] What Value Honesty?


> That's a legitimate question.
>
> Corruption and dishonesty is a fact of life throughout our society to the
> highest levels of government. Sometimes it seems like we are all drowning 
> in
> a sea of crooks as they do everything imaginable to bankrupt the rest of 
> us.
>
>
> And, in spite of it all, not everyone accepts their crazy morality.
> Misplaced valuables do end up in the "Lost and Found"; we'd just like to 
> see
> it happen more often.
>
> I've been reading an interesting autographical book by Clyde Rice(1). It 
> won
> the 1984 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Clyde tells of
> living in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in the desperate 
> years
> of the great depression. Two catastrophes had befallen him in quick order 
> as
> he tried to provide for his family: his job on the ferryboats came to an
> abrupt end with the completion of the Golden Gate bridge and an attempt to
> build a business selling goat's milk was sabotaged when crooked dairy
> farmers bribed corrupt county officials to ban the sale of anything but
> cow's milk in the major markets. The failure cost him all of his savings. 
> It
> led him to flirt briefly with the idea of being dishonest and then to
> reconcile his feelings about it.
>
> Clyde has this to say about the value of honesty:
>
> "All I had to do was go to the county and join the relief and join the 
> dole
> and say, "take care of me." Millions did, and food and clothing and job
> preference would be mine. But I was proud. I was proud of my father, I was
> proud of his pride, as he was a upright man. I was essentially an upright
> man; we were, in comparison to our contemporaries, much more honest and
> dependable. As my father said, if you lean enough fence posts together 
> they
> can all stand up... We believed that if twenty percent of the citizenry 
> were
> honest, though it paid to be dishonest, the fabric of society built on 
> trust
> and plain honesty would stand. The trouble with honesty was that it held 
> you
> back in politics and worldly goods. But if certain men were not stalwart
> enough to accept the losses incurred by straight dealing, the whole
> government and interpersonal relationships would tumble. We accepted the
> burden because we had to be a tent pole, to hold the tent up, and, as in
> Plato's scheme, we were paid in esteem and self-esteem. And we were 
> proud --
> not overweening pride -- but a sense of an ill-paid job well done. That
> being the case, I had to go on as I had been going."
>
> As I read that I thought about the honest people I know. I'm blessed to 
> know
> many of them. And I thought about many who I've never met: soldiers who
> serve in Iraq alongside the morally corrupt who the army now actively
> recruits to keep up its quotas - people the army would never consider in 
> the
> past. I think about honest men who have spent years and years locked away 
> in
> our prison in Cuba. Surely those are not all crooks or terrorists. The
> simple fact that our government will not allow their cases to be heard
> publicly ensures that.
>
> With so many honest, upright people suffering at the hands of others, how
> can we tolerate one dishonest person, one dishonest act, and accept their
> dishonesty because it's too inconvenient, too complicated or too difficult
> to bring them to justice?
>
> Ron D'Eau Claire
>
> (1) A Heaven in the Eye by Clyde Rice, 1984, ISBN 0-380-69919-2
>
>
>
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