ethics – Glenn Jacob

On Table Manners

We were not overtaken by the pandemic pounds from the forced isolation like we expected. Instead, my wife and I looked up from our roasted chicken meal last night and realized that we had thrown most of our table manners out the window. We had devolved into slobs.

Please understand, we have had to practice topnotch manners for decades, as we attended weddings, b’nai mitzvah parties, desserts, business meetings, congregational dinners, and private invitations to congregant homes. We learned to cut up anything served in a red sauce smaller than usual to avoid a “whoopsie,” an advertisement of clumsiness on good clothes. At shiva calls, if the offerings were not finger foods, then all was to be avoided lest the paper/garish plastic plate become our downfall. “Just a cookie please, we have more obligations.”

Yet, we sat across from each other with greasy fingers, picking tidbits from chicken pieces and chasing errant pieces of zucchini and sweet potato threatening to fall off the edge of the plate. Looking down from my fingers, I realized there was no napkin waiting in lap, which I usually need for the whoopsies. Dressed in my old, stained sweats with dogs hovering beneath my stool with bated breath, what was the point of having a napkin? Oh yeah: I cannot touch anything clean without smearing grease on it.

We are not going to restaurants anytime soon, so what is the point?

The point is the lack of attention has demeaned our daily rituals. Our ritual of table manners has served my family for years. Every so often, my adult children thank us for demanding they learn how to carry themselves in public. They have experienced the business meal where their good manners stood out as polite, conscientious, and engaged while those without such knowledge were diminished. We all sat across from diners in any situation with confidence that our conversations would not be sidetracked by an obvious faux pas.

I always considered table manners to be the great equalizer amid the American melting pot. The rituals of sharing a meal with others transcends cultures, countries, education, and economics. This is not a matter of whether one culture belches loudly after a good meal, which can be interesting. Table manners, no matter what culture where one is seated, is about demonstrating respect for the other. They are the simplest vehicles for offering respect, whether the etiquette is over chopsticks, hand foods, or western utensils.

Table manners broadcast respect for ourselves and for others in a most personal and intimate setting. Our use or lack of these rituals telegraph who we are and what we think of others. The cliché, actions speak louder than words, is oh-so-true at the dinner table.

Let not the sticklers for etiquette deter us from the task of giving respect for others. No one really cares if the bananas foster is served with a fork or a spoon; we only care whether you will wait for mine to be served so that we may share together. Table manners are something we do together, a ritual we share that confirms quietly and unobtrusively the respect we each offer.

Unless it’s barbeque in my house, in which case all bets are off and you are on your own, sucker.

In Search of the Root Cause of Calamity

For more than curiosity, people will ask for the root cause(s) of events such as wars, accidents, and traumatic events. Perhaps they ask in hope of identifying preventive process or they to provoke meaning to a tragic loss of life. “Just tell me why” seems like a reasonable plea on the surface but the reality of an event betrays the simplistic nature of the request.

Root causes are a grail, a belief that if we can identify the one first cause of the event in question, then we can eradicate the possibility of this trauma every occurring again. Ending tragic death by the erasure of the elements that lead to strife, death and destruction is a lofty, noble goal yet a naive one. A simple argument is that humanity is far too enmeshed in the struggles for security of all types, the consequences of history, and the needs of the day to affect by the removal of one element easily and thoroughly. War and terror is always a combination of elements, of factors, of processes put into place some time ago and chance that all the prerequisites will align.

When they align, someone has to explain standing near the debris of the aftermath. Pundits hate non-specific explanations. The person at the microphone, whether the person is the sheriff, head of an agency or investigative board, a district attorney, or the president of a country appears as defensive bureaucrat because they can offer no one concise reason. They declare in one form or another, “It is complicated; there are many reasons; the reasons are unclear; we have differing points of view, ideology or religion.” The presenters are condemned for hiding the answers when they do not have the answers or worse, there are no real answers to be had.

My example: Columbine was a terrible massacre. The reasons and explanations of motivations of the two shooters were a universe of opinions, innuendo, pseudo-science, and arm-chair punditry – and every educated speculation offered up in the first years, including many of the facts, were wrong. Only after ten years was a definitive study of the event, including an examination of all of the facts, published. The conclusions offered did not resemble anything presented in the first year and the reasons confounded most of the speculation of the early years. At the end of this thick tome, the reasons did not lend themselves to easy or satisfying solutions.

If Columbine was restricted to two shooters and one high school, and after a thorough, ten year examination there was no simple straightforward answer of why, then how do we turn to the greater events of the day, the Syrian Civil War, the so-called Islamic State, the massacres of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the slaughter by Al Shabab in northern Kenya, and expect explanations that lead to solutions?

The point is now clear: the simplistic hope of a root cause leads only to absurdity and despair. Even if there is a root cause, there are plenty of other elements, other causes that lead to outbreaks of war, invasion, revolution, and self-righteously justified slaughter of innocents. There is more than one root cause and the answers we need to seek are not going to be simple. Why indeed.

Precipitating the argument above is a paper released recently on the effects of climate change on the Syrian Civil War. A root cause, if such a thing exists, is a recent migration within the country. As the southern and southeastern parts of the country were consumed by an accelerating and expanding desertification of the land, the people who eked out a living on these previously marginal lands were forced to relocate in camps surrounding the urban centers of Syria. These displaced families, clans, and tribes received little or no support from the government and they became the fuel upon which the civil strife exploded into civil war. All of the fractures of economic, social, and civic struggle were already in place, a product of the al-Assad regimes but climate change may have been a root cause among many, many reasons.

The purpose of the paper was to demonstrate a larger thesis that climate change will exacerbate tensions and clashes across the globe. With the rapid expansion of the Sahara Desert, we should expect war and violence in the countries affected: Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Niger, Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia and so on. When resources such as water and arable land disappear, people will compete for ever-shrinking resources. Villages and tribes will migrate and fanaticism born of desperation will fortify them as they surge outward.

The hatreds and the competitions are already there. The battles between religions are millennia-long wars that may be the continuance of tribal wars that preceded the missionaries. The competition over resources, the best land or the water source or the salt pan is ancient. The xenophobia is ever present. By luck or by goodly intervention these points of friction were kept cool and calm for periods of time. If the thesis is correct, climate change will overwhelm the good luck and extinguish the noble efforts of peacemakers.

The solutions are easy to state and terribly hard to implement. In fact they sound like the prophets of the Bible railing against the kings of Judah and Israel. (Addressing climate change is essential but at this moment it is not the concern of this argument.) The solution is to support the peacemakers and pull back the warmongers. Feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Give the homeless shelters and to the displaced give jobs. Stop selling weapons overseas. Demand diplomacy first. Yet all of these reasonable solutions, all of which address fundamental causes, are nigh impossible to implement in part much less in full.

The time has already arrived when we need to stop asking “why” and start accessing “what can we do?” We are not helpless and we are not without possibilities. However, we are lacking time and we, the peacemakers and the repairers of the world, need to act.

An Inspector General’s integrity

The operative word is INTEGRITY and the Washington Post has posted a story of the latest breach of integrity. This breach is not from our legislators but from the bureaucracy, the Civil Service that actually is the majority of our government. The appalling nature of this breach is accusation that the Inspector General, the oversight mechanism, failed to tell the truth by lying by omission.

Described by the Washington Post: “After the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] hired several nongovernmental organizations to set up pro-democracy programs in Egypt — even though they were not registered to work in the country. Less than a year later, the Egyptian government charged 43 NGO workers with operating illegally. Sixteen of them were Americans, including the son of then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.”

The USAID paid the bail for these 43 people of $4.3 million, which is understood by the auditors of the USAID as a paid bribe to release the jailed hostages. None of this debacle was mentioned in the Inspector General’s report because he was awaiting confirmation to be the permanent Inspector General and did not want to make waves. He failed the most basic test.

We pay I.G.’s to make waves. We put I.G.’s in place to expose this sort of unethical and illegal behavior. The bottom line is that we expect Inspectors General to be the epitome of integrity. Nonetheless, no disciplinary action has been taken. Mr. Carroll has withdrawn his nomination but will remain in the same office as Deputy Inspector General. There will be no disciplinary action apparently.

When integrity is diminished, cynicism fills the void. One man’s act of cowardice, of fear of reporting his job because it might make him look like a poorer prospect, has diminished an entire agency and lot of the good work that the USAID actually does. Everyone loses.