Whistleblowers Remain Right

Whistleblowers Remain Right

Whistleblowers are right making in their allegations.  I was.  I think others are, too.  But outsiders can come to different conclusions.

After Attorney General Barr released his letter on the Mueller investigation, David Brooks at the New York Times wrote about our craziness on the subject of President Trump. 

Over the past two years, many people on the left have stood up and denounced collusion by Trump and his allies with the Russians.  They called him out as a traitor.  They risked retaliation by the party in power for their accusations.

During the same period, many on the right have denounced the Mueller investigation.  The claim of collusion was all a hoax, they said.  Worse, it posed the threat of a coup against a legitimately elected government, according to them.  Lefties mocked them and their fantasies.

Now that the investigation is done, evidence of collusion by the Trump administration didn’t prove criminality beyond a reasonable doubt.  Mueller’s work, however, led to charges against 37 defendants, including 6 Trump associates.  Brooks says both sides should take a breath.  They should see this as an opportunity to show some humility.  Maybe some should even apologize for their heated comments.

But, Brooks warns, scandals like this are a mainstay of current political life.  They are the bases for our competing senses of superiority.

The same thing goes for organizational life witnessed by whistleblowers.

After none of my many allegations of misconduct by HomeFirst Services stuck, I never saw reason to apologize for bringing them up.  It seemed to me that I had every right to challenge them although that triggered HomeFirst’s decision to fire me.  So I did.

HomeFirst Board members were stalwart in their defense of the CEO’s handling of possible violations.  They called me Mr. Bleak for my repeated warnings that the company could run out of money in the coming months.  When they needed a bail-out from Santa Clara County (Calif.) to cover payroll, no one called to thank me for the heads up.

Once whistleblowers lose their cases, they usually vanish from view.  Excepting some big names like Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden and a few smaller players who hang on.  Some flog their cases in the courts beyond what good sense explains – Robert Purcell stayed at it for 18 years.  Others, like Jessie Guitron, periodically float into interviews years after being fired.  For the rest, media indifference keeps private how they adapt to losing.

The organizations are more likely to justify themselves publicly.  Wells Fargo, Guitron’s former employer, was hit by fines, subjected to nasty publicity, and lost two CEOs, and it says it has transformed itself. Transformation, though, did not include apologizing to Guitron or the hundreds of others it retaliated against.

It’s hard to know when you should give up a strongly held conviction.   That’s true for whistleblowers at each stage of their projects – when they first see a wrong, when they tell their bosses, when they report it internally and then externally.  It’s equally true for their organizations and for both critics and supporters of the President.

In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, Margareta Magnusson guides readers through discarding the physical accumulations of their lives.  She encourages us to give things up to simplify our living, to move what we don’t need to better homes, and to make it easier for others when we die.

I heeded her advice first in my kitchen.  I tossed spices unused for years and foods with best-used-by dates in 2012.  I set in the compost bin soba noodles, tiny black lentils, colorful dry beans I’d been given years ago, and an expired cheese making kit.  The resulting cupboards appeared to belong to a less interesting person, I’m afraid.

That is part of the problem with giving up our opinions, even after they are shown to be faulty or unproductive.  Without them, we can be seen as less vital, less significant, and less alive. 

Sometimes it just feels better to keep flogging our case.  I kept reporting new problems at HomeFirst even after it was obvious the CEO and Board would do nothing about them.  I fight now to give up thinking that Trump did indeed collude with the Russians.