On its face, it seems a small story. It begins when a student at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Arizona, fritters away her senior spring and is failing her English class. Her teacher, Elizabeth Joice, warns her she might not graduate with her class on May 23. No improvement.

So Ms. Joice sends failure notices home. No response. She phones the student’s father. No change. As graduation looms, Ms. Joice offers the student ways to improve her grade, which so far is based on unexcused absences, plagiarized work, and low test scores. No interest.

Finally, in mid-May, it dawns on the parents that their daughter might not graduate. So they retain Glendale lawyer Stan Massad. He writes a bludgeon-wielding letter to Ms. Joice, misspelling her name but threatening litigation unless the student graduates. He also utters dark promises to look into “all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present” should the case go to court. Ms. Joice, a 17-year English teaching veteran, replies with an immediate, lengthy, articulate letter that dismantles his points one by one.

Case closed — or so one would have thought. But then, in an as-yet-unexplained collapse of moral courage, district assistant superintendent Dudley Butts sides with the parents, gives the student a make-up exam five hours prior to commencement, and slides her into graduation. Ms. Joice refuses to attend the ceremony.

After the case hits the headlines, public outrage builds. The Peoria Unified School District mumbles an apology, but only for causing a furor, not for letting the student graduate. More importantly, the Arizona State Bar Association launches an investigation of Mr. Massad for unethical conduct.

A small story? Yes, but touching larger trends of parental litigiousness and bullying. Remember Christine Pelton, the teacher in Piper, Kansas, who resigned last winter rather than bow to parental and school-board demands that she give passing grades to 28 students caught plagiarizing?

At stake here are two core values. One is responsibility. “It seems in our popular culture today,” Ms. Joice wrote in her response to the lawyer, “people, including a past president, are no longer willing to accept any responsibility or consequences for their actions or choices they make.” She’s put her finger on the get-away-with-it culture, where the driving purpose is to do as little as you can for as much reward as possible. That purpose is a bastard son of the productivity movement — where, of course, the object is precisely to minimize input and maximize output. In the corporate world, improving productivity is a valid objective. In the mental and moral realm, it’s a canard. The point of hard work in school, like learning of any sort, is not to get something (as you would from a production line) but to become someone. The saddest point, here, is the parents’ apparent conviction that getting things like diplomas is what life is all about.

The other value at stake here is fairness. “I would be remiss in my duties as a teacher,” Ms. Joice writes, “if I passed the student knowing that she did not complete the required work.” Powerful questions grow from this logic: What about other students who obeyed the regulations and passed — or those who failed and, without lawyers, are currently having to attend summer school?

If this still seems a small story, try some word substitution:

• “I would be remiss in my duties as an Arthur Andersen accountant if I gave this corporation a clean audit knowing that it did not meet the required standards.”
• “I would be remiss in my duties as a stockbroker if I gave one client inside tips on when to sell her ImClone stock that I didn’t give the public at large.”
• “I would be remiss in my duties as a CEO if I used my influence to avoid paying taxes on paintings I bought in New York by having them shipped to New Hampshire and then returned to my Manhattan flat.”

Fairness — whether in schools or in the above cases concerning Enron, Martha Stewart, or Tyco — is a core issue these days. When those who are supposed to be regulators (like accountants and superintendents) or to be self-regulated (like brokers, corporate leaders, and school boards) fail in their jobs, the results are the same, whether the stakes involve millions of invested dollars or hundreds of student futures.

Now, about this disdain for regulation, this disregard for fairness, this avoidance of responsibility: Where does it come from? People learn it. Where? In school. How? Not in the classroom, but through all those other signals that constitute the school climate. In Peoria, as the administration caved in, the signals got stronger. Unless that climate is reversed quickly and decisively — and it still could be — let’s steel ourselves for the results. And let’s not be surprised when we read about yet another corporate or political leader skidding into irresponsibility — and learn that he or she graduated, through parental coercion and educational cowardice, from a Sunrise Mountain High somewhere in America.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics

“We are the ones who chose not to report criminal actions of priests to the authorities, because the law did not require it … who worried more about the possibility of scandal than bringing about the kind of openness that helps prevent abuse … who, at times, responded to victims and families as adversaries and not as suffering members of the church.”

BOSTON
At least seven grand jury investigations are believed to be under way across the United States as state prosecutors look into the role Roman Catholic bishops may have played in sheltering priests accused of sexually abusing children.

The criminal investigations, most prominent in Boston and New York, are also being carried out in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and St. Louis, USA Today reported last week.

Legal experts caution that the grand jury investigations face steep hurdles due to expired statutes of limitations and the difficulty of prosecuting someone for enabling another person to commit a crime.

But even if criminal indictments fail to emerge, many say a clearer picture of how the church sheltered, shuffled, and protected alleged abusers from prosecution will likely emerge, according to the Boston Globe.

“Convening a grand jury makes sense because it protects against the practice that the church can make discretionary decisions on disclosure” of documents about abusive priests, New England School of Law professor Wendy Murphy told the Globe.

“The rules are much tougher with a criminal grand jury, and the sanctions for noncompliance much more severe,” added Murphy, a former prosecutor who now represents alleged victims of sexual abuse. “To make sure that all the paper gets produced, unredacted, the grand jury is a solution.”

Boston Cardinal Bernard Law is reportedly the target of one such investigation due to his handling of allegedly abusive priests, including Rev. Paul Shanley, who was transferred and allowed to work with children despite known allegations of sexual abuse, the Associated Press reported.

The Boston diocese run by Cardinal Law, who has become a lightning rod for public anger and Catholic dissent, last week announced that overall church spending will be cut by 40 percent during its new fiscal year, largely due to a lack of response to Law’s recent fundraising pleas.

“So far the returns … have been very discouraging,” an unidentified high-ranking church official told the Globe, noting that Catholics were not responding to Law’s request for funds. “Quite frankly, the whole thing is a mess.”

The Washington Post reports that parishioners across the country may be punishing the church for its handling of the sex abuse crisis.

According to a recent Post poll, more than half of all U.S. Catholics disapprove of the bishops’ efforts to tackle the problem of sexually abusive priests.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced a new church policy, promising to remove any abusive priest from public ministry. Their “zero tolerance” policy, however, would not defrock abusive priests, but rather would transfer them to cloistered, supervised conditions away from minors.

That policy failed to appease much of the public, including many Catholics who accuse the bishops of shunting the problem onto priests without accepting enough responsibility. At the USCCB meeting, the bishops deferred the issue of how to hold themselves accountable, promising a committee report in six months, according to the Post.

While promising to punish priests, “the bishops say absolutely nothing about sanctions or consequences for the bishops themselves who covered up sex abuse or moved priest felons around to other parishes or even dioceses,” Catholic reform group Call to Action said last week.

Since January, at least 250 U.S. priests have been dismissed or resigned their posts, joining roughly 1,250 others over the past 40 years, according to statistics from USA Today.

WASHINGTON
Executing retarded people for crimes they commit is “cruel and unusual punishment” according to current public sentiment and is therefore unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week.

The Court’s 6-to-3 decision reverses its own 1989 ruling, which upheld the right of states to kill death-row inmates considered to be retarded — generally having an IQ of 70 or lower.

At the time of the first verdict, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that there was “insufficient evidence of a national consensus” against such executions to warrant barring them.

Last week, Justice O’Connor switched her vote, rejecting the arguments of the Court’s most conservative members and agreeing that societal norms had changed sufficiently to outlaw the practice.

Since the Court’s 1989 ruling, the number of states with laws barring the execution of the retarded has swelled from two to 18. Add in the 12 states with laws outlawing capital punishment altogether, and the total grows to 30, the Associated Press reported.

“It is not so much the number of these states that is significant, but the consistency of the direction of the change,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

Last week’s decision hinged on an interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, which outlaws “cruel and unusual punishments” of prisoners.

The Court’s majority, citing a shift in the public’s attitude toward capital punishment generally and toward executing the retarded specifically, said what once was acceptable is now generally seen as offensive.

In uncustomarily blunt language, Chief Justice William Rehnquist rejected the Court’s majority opinion as “seriously mistaken.”

WASHINGTON
When conducting random searches for drugs or weapons on public buses, police officers are not required to tell people that they have the right to refuse to be searched, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week.

If travelers are not already aware of their right to refuse such searches, the police do not have to inform them nor remind those who have forgotten, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court’s majority.

The case in question dealt with two men searched on a Greyhound bus in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1999. Two police officers stood watch at the front and rear of the bus while a third officer walked down the aisle, searching passengers at their seats.

Two men, who were found wearing bags of cocaine taped to their legs, consented to the search at the time, but later said they felt intimidated and coerced into permitting the search.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled the men had no cause to feel intimidated. “The officers gave the passengers no reason to believe that they were required to answer the officers’ questions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

“Even when law enforcement officers have no basis for suspecting a particular individual, they may pose questions, ask for identification, and request consent to search luggage — provided they do not induce cooperation by coercive means,” Kennedy wrote.

That proviso was the heart of the case — not whether citizens have the right to refuse to cooperate with such searches, but whether the behavior of police make such searches feel coercive, the New York Times reported.

Justice Kennedy sided with law enforcement, maintaining that as long as police officers do not “brandish a weapon” and use “a polite, quiet voice,” passengers have no place feeling pressured into cooperating.

Justice David Souter sharply disagreed. “When the attention of several officers is brought to bear on one civilian, the imbalance of immediate power is unmistakable,” Justice Souter wrote for the Court’s minority. “We all understand this.”

“A police officer who is certain to get his way has no need to shout,” Justice Souter noted in his dissent.

The Court’s 6-to-3 decision dealt specifically with public buses, but was written broadly enough to extend to other forms of mass transit, including trains and planes, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

“Any captive audience is essentially fair game under this ruling,” Josh Dratel, an official of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told the Boston Globe.

The U.S. Justice Department welcomed the ruling, which came after it asked the Court to consider current terrorist threats when weighing whether or not to alter the balance of power in police searches.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs condemned that argument as “a transparent play on emotion…. The Constitution did not change on September 11,” they warned the Globe.

WASHINGTON
Proselytizers, politicians, and people with a cause or product to peddle do not need a permit to knock on your door and start a conversation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in a case testing First Amendment protections.

With an 8 -to-1 vote, the Court struck down a Stratton, Ohio, law that required door-to-door salespeople — whether touting vacuum cleaners or religion — to first register with the town and obtain a permit.

Stratton officials wrote the law in 1998 after a wave of unwanted peddlers swept through town, conning some of Stratton’s older citizens into supporting bogus causes, the Washington Post reported.

Members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion refused to obey the new ordinance and sued, saying that God, not town officials, gave them their mandate to canvass the area.

Last week, the Supreme Court sidestepped that religious argument, but insisted that peddlers are protected by the First Amendment from seeking legal permission before trying to spread their message.

“It is offensive, not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society, that in the context of everyday public discourse a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the Court’s majority.

Allowing the permit requirement to stand would be a “dramatic departure from our national heritage and constitutional tradition” of protecting speech, even when unpopular, from constraint, Justice Stevens added.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented from the verdict, saying that cities should be able to restrict canvassing in order to protect their citizens. In his argument, Justice Rehnquist pointed to the 2001 murder of two Dartmouth College professors, who were killed by teenagers posing as pollsters.

ZURICH
A lawyer saying he represents victims of South African apartheid last week launched a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against three Swiss and U.S. banks, accusing them of propping up the government’s racist regime.

Edward Fagan, who helped force Swiss banks into a $1.25 billion settlement in 1998 for victims of the Nazis, announced the lawsuit last week in Zurich. Fagan said he expects the class-action suit to be joined by thousands of South Africans.

Switzerland’s UBS and Credit Suisse as well as U.S.-based Citicorp Inc., which owns Citibank, were named as plaintiffs, the Reuters news agency reported.

“This is only the beginning,” Fagan said at a news conference after being heckled by Swiss critics, who accused him of profiteering. Fagan said more suits will soon be announced against banks and other firms in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.

Fagan’s suit accuses the companies of providing large-scale loans to the South African government, despite a 1962 call by the United Nations to withdraw all support for the racist government, according to the Associated Press.

“Were it not for the conspiracy of these financial institutions and companies, apartheid would not have been kept alive,” the lawsuit contends.

“When everybody else was divesting, the Swiss banks took up the cause and added much more money,” U.S. lawyer Diane Sammons, part of Fagan’s team, told the AP. “They continued to profit from these crimes against humanity.”

A Credit Suisse spokeswoman last week denounced the suit as “preposterous” and “unsubstantiated by the facts.”

NEW YORK
Credit card giant Citibank last week said it would no longer let its customers use their credit cards for online gambling — a move that follows a warning from New York State that such transactions could be illegal.

Citibank, which controls about 12 percent of the nation’s credit card market, said it would block Internet gambling sites from processing debts owed by the company’s 33 million Visa and MasterCard holders.

Regulators for New York State approached Citibank late last year, saying the company may be running foul of federal law by processing its customers’ transactions with gambling sites, reported the New York Times.

U.S. law bars online gambling, but has proven largely impotent at curbing its spread since most gaming sites are hosted outside of the United States, where the laws do not apply.

Taking a different tack in the fight against online betting, regulators have begun targeting U.S. financial firms, contending that the companies are abetting online betting by honoring online wagers.

Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, MBNA, and ProvidianBank have already begun blocking such transactions, according to the Associated Press.

Last week, Citibank joined the club, saying the move made good business sense since online gambling resulted in “increased potential for fraud loss” and higher “delinquency rates,” according to a spokeswoman.

“This is a signal,” Ken Dreifach, chief of the New York State attorney general’s Internet Bureau, said last week. “It’s a shot across the bow to financial institutions that are supporting gambling [and] making profits off of the financial hardships of compulsive gamblers.”

Citibank also agreed last week to donate $400,000 to organizations that counsel people about addictive gambling, according to the Times.

DALLAS
Southwest Airlines last week took some heat after warning very heavy passengers that they will be required to pay for an extra seat if they cannot fit comfortably into a single seat, sparking complaints of discrimination.

Southwest says its policy has been in place since 1980, but has been haphazardly enforced, prompting complaints from larger passengers who felt arbitrarily targeted, the Associated Press reported.

Southwest spokeswoman Beth Harbin said other passengers thought the lax enforcement was a problem, too, noting that nine out of 10 complaint letters to the airline focused on passengers who felt crowded by large travelers.

Two years ago, a California judge upheld Southwest’s right to charge a large passenger for an extra seat, saying the policy was within the air carrier’s right — a position supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation, HealthScoutNews reported.

Southwest says it reminded its employees about the second-seat policy to ensure consistency of treatment and ease of travel for all passengers. Those charged for a second seat may later request a full refund if the flight was not full.

The AP notes that other U.S. carriers, including American, Continental, and Northwest, have similar policies for larger passengers.

Morgan Downey, head of the American Obesity Association, criticized the airlines for failing to accommodate larger passengers at the same fare as others.

The policy is “discriminatory and it’s mean-spirited,” Donwey said. “This is singling out a group that’s been very heavily stigmatized rather than making some accommodations in their cabins.”

LONDON
British employers were urged last week to tackle entrenched forms of workplace discrimination, which are costing businesses billions of dollars and are illegal under European Union human rights laws.

Racial discrimination remains relatively rampant in the United Kingdom, especially along the higher rungs of the corporate ladder, according to a survey from the public advocacy group Business in the Community.

Only 3.4 percent of Britain’s senior management are members of an ethnic minority, according to the study.

Some companies, including BP (formerly British Petroleum) have recently made public pledges to promote greater diversity among its workforce — a promising sign, but one that needs wider support, critics say.

“To make things happen there has to be very positive leadership from the very top of an organization,” Mike Fairey, the deputy chief executive of Lloyds TSB, told the BBC.

Brenda King, a senior manager at Consignia, agrees, but says that such support must involve more than the recruitment of minorities.

“A lot of companies bring in equal opportunity schemes, they focus on getting people in,” King, who is black, told the BBC. “What they don’t do is focus on schemes to develop people so they start moving up the organization.”

Age discrimination remains a problem, too, costing employers an estimated $46.4 billion a year, according to a recent report from the Employers Forum on Age.

“There’s a feeling that people over 50 are getting the rough end of the stick, and that people get round this kind of discrimination by advertising for ‘recently qualified graduates,’” employment relations minister Alan Johnson recently told the Financial Times.

“People shouldn’t be consigned to the scrap heap, whatever their age,” Johnson added, according to coverage from the BBC.

The report notes that the United Kingdom is obliged by EU law to enact legislation barring many forms of workplace discrimination by 2006.

CHICAGO
The American Medical Association (AMA) last week said researchers should study whether financial incentives would encourage people to donate their organs to a healthcare system badly in need of them.

Citing a critical lack of organs for needed transplants, the AMA said research investigating whether monetary incentives could kick-start organ donations was worthwhile, reported the Associated Press.

Federal law currently prohibits such incentives, so studying the issue would likely require congressional waivers, noted the AP.

The AMA’s move came after a heated debate at the organization’s annual meeting, where some doctors denounced the ethics of paying people to donate organs, regardless of whether such incentives work.

“You can’t use evidence from scientific studies to define ethics,” Dr. Rex Greene, a medical oncologist from California, said at a committee hearing before the vote.

Supporters of the measure say something must be done to address the dearth of donated organs, and that the ethics are not clear-cut in the matter.

The AP report notes that while organ donations have remained roughly level — 5,000 to 6,000 annually — over the past decade, the number of people needing transplants has quadrupled to 80,000.

“In a perfect world, altruism would be all that would be needed” to encourage more organ donation, Dallas physician Dr. Phil Berry Jr. told the AMA. “The fact is that we’re losing the battle.”

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia
The National Post is reporting that new Canadian Finance Minister John Manley has blasted the new U.S. Farm Bill that gives massive agricultural subsidies. His remarks came at a G7 Finance Ministers Meeting in Halifax.

The meeting is one of the final preparatory meetings before the G7 heads of state meet in Kananaskis, Alberta, on June 26-28, 2002.

Minister Manley pointed out that while the United States is trying to persuade Afghan farmers to switch from poppies, which supply the drug trade but also help to destabilize this recent terrorist haven, they are undermining their own strategy by the new subsidies that amount to close to $190 billion over the next decade.

Any switch to so-called pulse crops, such as beans, lentils, and chick peas, by Afghan farmers will be short-lived as Afghan farmers will not be competitive against the U.S. producers of these same crops, Manley said.

According to the Canadian government and many other critics in Europe and the developing world, the farm subsidies would not only hurt farmers in developed countries, but also potentially be disastrous for the poor farmers of the Third World. This would occur despite the pledge by the United States, that the new multilateral trade talks launched at Doha, Qatar, would be the “development round.”

The National Post is reporting that the public linking of the farm subsidies to Afghanistan at the G7 Finance Ministers meeting came as a surprise to the participants who are used to more “congenial and reserved” public statements.

How society protects the rights of those who may not be in a position to protect themselves was a prominent theme in the ethics news during June. We led this week’s edition of Newsline with two items related to that issue: grand jury investigations into the role Catholic bishops may have played in covering up sexual abuse of minors by priests, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing execution of the retarded. We reported on similar issues in the June 17 issue: a high court ruling that the disabled cannot claim a right to jobs that endanger them, and that prisoners can be compelled to take part in a program that requires them to confess to additional crimes. Other related stories included a report on a legal rejection of the use of Internet filters in libraries to shield children from pornography (June 10), and a probe into reports that U.S. Navy sailors were used as guinea pigs in Cold War-era bio-weapons experiments without their knowledge or consent.

Business practices of major corporations headlined the news during June: the conviction of Arthur Andersen in an obstruction of justice case (June 17), new SEC rules to hold CEOs more accountable for financial reporting practices (June 17), a spike in white-collar crime (June 10), the resignation of the CEO of Tyco amid claims of tax irregularities (June 10), an accounting-practice investigation of Halliburton (June 3), and a claim of conflict of interest against Ernst & Young (June 3).

The intersection of ethics and technology news was a busy one during June, with reports of Citibank’s crackdown on the use of its credit card for Internet gambling (June 24), a court decision protecting patent law (June 3), and a charge that research from a prominent lab may be riddled with errors (June 3).

As usual, we also featured several stories dealing with the ethics of international business, including a lawsuit against banks that lent to the South African government (June 24), a call from Nigeria’s leader for other nations to help track down funds looted by corrupt African officials (June 17), a report noting that British working women have not achieved financial or professional parity with their male counterparts (June 10), and the continuing exchange of conflict-of-interest charges involving the awarding of government contracts to Canadian firms (June 3).

From the Gallup News Service:

“On Tuesday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee opened hearings on steroid and drug use in major league baseball. Earlier this month, former National League MVP Ken Caminiti rocked the sports world by admitting that he used steroids for healing purposes while playing baseball in the major leagues.

“Caminiti went on to say that he believed as many as 50 percent of major league players use steroids. These revelations came just shortly after former major league All-Star Jose Canseco admitted that he used steroids while playing and suggested that as many as 85 percent of major leaguers use steroids. Both players have since backed off from those stated percentages, but Canseco plans to write a book about his playing days, and disclose the names of players who used steroids.

“How have fans of professional baseball reacted to these claims of steroid abuse in the sport? A CNN/USA Today/ Gallup poll conducted June 7-8 of this year finds that most baseball fans think that at least some players use steroids, but would tend to disagree with Caminiti and Canseco’s very high estimates of the use of steroids in baseball. A majority of fans (56 percent) believe less than half of major leaguers use steroids, and 2 percent believe that none of the players do. But, 12 percent believe that more than half, and 24 percent believe that about half, of the players use these drugs.

“The home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 and the new record set by Barry Bonds in 2001 are two of the most memorable events in baseball’s history…. Many theories have been offered for the increased offense in baseball…. Baseball experts … mention the increased strength of players, which may be due to increased weight training or the use of steroids or other performance enhancing drugs.

“The Gallup poll shows that most fans believe steroid use factors in to baseball’s growing offense. A third of baseball fans (33 percent) say they think the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs is a ‘major factor’ in the increase. Another 45 percent say it is a ‘minor factor.’ Just 18 percent of fans believe that players’ use of steroids or performance enhancing drugs are not a factor in the increased offense.

“Two major American sports leagues, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, prohibit the use of steroids (and other performance-enhancing drugs) by players, and test for them. Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League do not….

“If it were left to the opinion of fans, steroid testing would become a reality in the major leagues. A vast majority of professional baseball fans (86 percent) say they believe players should be tested, while just 12 percent do not.”

RE: “Moral Courage: Three Lessons,” June 10, 2002.

Dear Rushworth:

I enjoyed reading your thoughts about the three women and moral courage.

I do have a question about your comment: “Nor is she (Ms. Rowley) out to save her own skin.” Is this true? Clearly, her closing statements in her memo to the director indicate that she is taking advantage of the Federal Whistleblower Act protections available to her. Had she not included those references, would she still be at the FBI? I agree that her reasons for writing her memo were not to save her own skin, but to provide information to the director and to Congress about ways she felt the FBI could improve. Yet taking the memo to members of Congress and not just to the director does suggest that she knew without congressional support, she could be hung out to dry.

– Ward C. Schendel, JD
Roseville, Minnesota, U.S.A.

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”

– Aristotle (Greek philosopher, 384-322 B.C.)

Out for a walk one morning last week, I passed a screened porch where a business executive was charging into his day on a mobile phone. He was explaining what sounded like a deal nearly consummated. The only thing left, he asserted, was just to “connect the dots!”

In recent weeks, that phrase has burrowed deep into the American lexicon — ever since we began hearing that the White House, the FBI, and the CIA may have had early warnings about the 9/11 terrorists. To be sure, the clues were scattered, imprecise, and vague. But shouldn’t they be held accountable? Couldn’t somebody have “connected the dots”?

Like many clichés, this one casts so wide a net that its use borders on the morally indefensible. In that regard, it resembles the popular cliché of an earlier generation: “Getting my ducks in a row.” That usually means “getting organized” or “neatening up my presentation” or some such thing. It’s a nice metaphor, until you examine its meaning.

For starters, how do ducks get in rows? Go watch a mother duck. She lines up her ducklings by taking a decisive lead, not by stopping to reorganize. Once she stops, the ducklings swarm around in gaggling disarray. But let her start swimming away, and they fall into a row behind her.

But the metaphor probably builds on something else: those metal cutout ducks used in shooting galleries. After they’ve been blasted down, somebody needs to stand them up again. “Getting your ducks in a row,” then, has overtones of something fun and simple on the great fairground of life. Look again, however, and it suggests the sly deceptions of the carnival operator, who organizes his ducks only in order to have apparently easy targets for unsuspecting customers. It is, in other words, a complex metaphor — and not a particularly positive one.

So it is with “connecting the dots.” The literal meaning, of course, comes from the child’s paper-and-pencil game, where numbered dots, apparently scattered in disarray, produce an amazing picture when connected in order. The phrase carries connotations of childhood innocence, of discovering order among chaos. It evokes the first stirrings of artistic creativity — the thrill of making a picture where before there had been nothing. Most subtly, it still suggests a task so simple that a four-year-old can do it.

Being unable to “connect the dots,” then, implies a profound and consequential failure of maturity, of success, of persistence, or of basic abilities. While adults sometimes fail to make connections, only the most inept children fail to connect dots. And if the adults can’t succeed where no four-year-old can fail — why, surely someone should hold those adults accountable!

So goes the logic. But the phrase biases the argument from the beginning. To be sure, it’s an appealing bias. In a complex world, such simplicity is seductive. In a scary world, there’s a need for euphemisms that let us talk about the enormity of events like 9/11 in gentle, nursery-like words. But the premise behind this phrase, and the view it implies of problem solving and decision making, may bear little resemblance to the situation at hand.

And that’s where the moral issue arises. If our language fails to assess the reality of the circumstances — and if we don’t even recognize that failure — then something is morally amiss. We’re not using the language; the language is using us.

The fact is that in international intelligence there are no “dots” numbered by some cosmic maker of kiddies’ workbooks and awaiting our magic pencil. This is no game for kids. Somewhere there are faint signals, disparate events, unconnected shards of evidence. Assembling them into an accurate picture of reality is the work of the most creative and seasoned minds in law enforcement.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t real problems with our intelligence gathering and analysis. In today’s world, these activities may not be coordinated. The analysts may lack access to the right signals. They may be underfunded, operating with antediluvian computers, having few human sources of information, lacking research and training in cutting-edge techniques of analysis.

But they aren’t kids, and terrorism isn’t a game. Their job is to make connections, not to connect dots. If we want them to do better, let’s at least take the responsibility of getting our language right.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics

“The feeding frenzy is pretty much over. People started looking at making all these radical changes and decided there was a real cost involved and that it would not solve the Enron problem.”