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June 22, 2003

Lack of Ethics

Susan Tifft has a good look at the repercussion of the sheer amount of public dishonesty we see in America today and the impact it has on American kids.

This Pinocchio culture has made kids alarmingly cynical: 43% agree that a person has to lie and cheat sometimes to get ahead, up nine points since 2000. The irony is that on many issues - school prayer and abortion, to name just two - young people today are more conservative than their elders. Yet they are surprisingly blasé about shading the truth.

They weren't born that way. They learned it from us.

One day soon they will be our politicians, lawyers, teachers, CEOs, auto mechanics and pilots, and they'll bring to those jobs the values they're absorbing now. Honor codes? Who knows whether they make a difference on college campuses? But the moment has come for our country's leading adults to sign one.

I was born when Lyndon Johnson was in office - a year after JFK was assissinated. I didn't know anything about the Vietnam war and I didn't understand the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident until recently. My political "awakening" was Watergate. I was still in grade school then, but part of my nightly routine was to watch the news with my Dad - and he was always willing to try and answer any questions I had about what was going on. We also had a subscription to Newsweek which I skimmed through every week (I've always been a rather obsessive reader - in the days before I discovered BBSs and the Internet, I'd been known to read the phone book when I was seriously bored and didn't have anything else to read in the house).

A lot of it was over my head at that age, but I read it nonetheless, and would then as my folks to explain what it all meant. They did their best - they had to try and simplify some of the concepts and smooth over some of the rougher spots - I was well under 10, after all - but I got the basic idea. They were also careful to explain to me that what President Nixon did wasn't the normal behaviour we expected from our leaders. They carefully told me that part of why everyone was so upset was because our President was supposed to be honest with us - unless there was something he couldn't tell us because it would put us in grave danger.

I accepted it, but part of me would always doubt after that. It's all well and good for my parents to tell me how honest our leaders have been (at least to the best of their knowledge), but when the first thing you become aware of politically is a scandal that least to a Presidential resignation, well.... trust just doesn't come quite so easily.

I found myself being rather fond of both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, but once Reagan took over the White House, something about him triggered that deep laid mistrust. Even today I can't put a finger on any specific thing - it was just the way he presented himself, the way he often "didn't know" things... along with the way things he said and plans he supported (trickle-down economics and Star Wars, to name a couple) didn't make much sense. The first George Bush, being his Vice President, and one who claimed to be "out of the loop" at that, was fighting a losing battle with me.

Then, of course, we got Clinton. I wanted to like him - I really did. I thought his policies made a great deal more sense, and he seemed to have a better idea of what was fair to the greatest number of people (as opposed to what best served the interests of the rich, something I had picked up very quickly as being of utmost importance to Reagan and Bush), but the man couldn't open his mouth without hedging, tap-dancing or outright lying.

And now. Now we have Bush the second. I don't need to recount all the questionable things he's said, claimed or done - just look through the blog and you'll find a pretty good accounting right there. Suffice it to say I don't believe anything he says. I can't.

I look at how cynical I've become over the years - how much I've been let down by this country's leaders over the years - and I wonder how any child growing up now can have any kind of faith in our government. Worse, I look at all the other scandals - be they with corporations, celebrities, academics, the legal system, among cops or wherever - and I don't know how they can have any trust whatsoever in the very institutions we're supposed to be able to rely upon to keep the country running.

Even moreso, I wonder how they're supposed to ever get the idea that being dishonest not only shouldn't be the norm, but should be viewed as wrong. I try to imagine what I would do as a parent, but I have no idea, really. There's so little we can point to any more and say "See, THIS is the kind of person you want to be."

I worry a great deal about the future - not just the future of the country, but of humanity in general. I remember when I was in school, if you got caught cheating, you got flunked. It was pretty simple. Now if you get caught cheating, it's more likely that someone's parents will sue the school than it is that the students will actually be punished for it.

What's the solution? No clue. Nothing's going to change if adults don't start acting like adults are supposed to - and if we don't start holding people in the public eye to a higher standard - you know, actually expecting them to be honest. But it seems these days that we only criticize dishonesty in people we are otherwise already opposed to. You hear it a lot, but it's very true - imagine what the reaction to the Bush administration's deceptions would be if Clinton were still in office - or if he were just a Democrat in general. There'd be so many investigations that nothing else would ever get done!

When we're to a point where the only reason dishonesty is ever pointed out as being a bad thing is when you can use it against someone else whom you want to bring down, there's something seriously out of whack.

Posted by thorswitch at June 22, 2003 07:32 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Dave Pollard at June 23, 2003 12:27 AM