A guy visiting a small mill town stops by the local diner where he sees a police officer having lunch. Doesn’t take long for him to overhear that the officer is actually the police chief of this little community.
Little further on into the lunch, he hears a commotion outside. An expensive oversized pickup truck is barreling down Main Street at a high rate of speed, honking the horn, diesel smoke pouring out the dual exhaust, and forcing other cars to get out of the way.
The visitor goes to the chief and asks him why he isn’t doing anything about it.
“That’s just Boyd, the mill foreman,” the chief says nonchalantly. “He does that every day ‘round lunch.”
The visitor is incredulous about hearing this. “But... you see how reckless he was? He almost caused two accidents!”
“Well folks ‘round here know better than to get anywhere near him,” the chief replied. “Why don’t you just finish your lunch, stranger, so you can be on your way.”
A minute later, there’s another commotion outside. Someone is running out of the local pharmacy and the clerk is following him and yelling “Hey, stop!”
The visitor then goes to the chief again. “Did you see that?”
“Yep,” replied the chief. “That’s just Elsie’s kid. She’s the town clerk. He probably just grabbed money from the register so he could go get some beer. She’ll pay the store back later on.”
“But...” the visitor started to say, only to be cut off by the police chief.
“Why don’t you just finish your lunch, stranger, and then be on your way.”
The visitor finished his lunch and was about to pay the bill when he sees a middle-aged man savagely assault a young woman right in front of the diner, in full-view of everyone. The visitor was irate and he turned to the chief.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see that!” he said.
The chief was unfazed, though. He just sat there sipping his coffee.
“That woman is getting beaten to death and you’re doing nothing?!” said the visitor. “You’re the police chief! Do something!”
The chief finally got up and arrested the visitor for disorderly conduct. He was held for a few hours before being brought before the local judge, who was the middle-aged man that the visitor had seen beating his wife.
When we talk about corruption, we usually think about bribery, quid-pro-quo. Some sort of personal gain to look the other way or to give favorites. They can come in the form of “campaign contributions” or clearing some personal debt or even helping a relative or spouse get a cushy job somewhere.
But there is another more insidious form of corruption that goes on that is harder to prove quid-pro-quo. One that is just as dangerous and damaging to society as someone on the take. One that literally happens on all levels of government.
It’s government cowardice.
The good ol’ boy police chief in our hypothetical small mill town sees out-and-out crimes being committed all the time. But he does nothing to stop them. In fact, he arrests the one person who sees these crimes happen and is incredulous about why nobody is doing anything about them, including the violent assault committed right in front of everyone. His willful inaction, his cowardice to doing his job in the face of crime literally happening right in front of him, is the corruption.
Notice how the visitor is the only one who speaks out and says these things are wrong and that something should be done. Nobody else stands up and says that it’s wrong to drive recklessly through Main Street at a high rate of speed, or that it’s wrong to steal money from the local pharmacy, or that it’s wrong to violently and viciously assault someone in broad daylight. If the police chief – the highest level of local law enforcement - is consciously willing to do nothing, why should anyone else? That is how pervasive the corruption is in that hypothetical community.
We saw this in real life during Prohibition a century ago. A vast majority of people didn’t believe the ban on alcohol was right. So they continued to drink, even breaking the law to do it. They turned to criminals to provide the alcohol, and local police did nothing to stop it.
Were they afraid of the mob? Were they drinkers themselves? Or were they just afraid to make waves and to do their job and incur the wrath of their superiors or local politicians or local judges? It’s easier for us to assume they were on the take or morally compromised than to believe that they were just afraid to do their job. Either way, their inaction encouraged the criminals to keep doing what they did and become as ruthless as they were. And it also encouraged people to keep breaking the law in order to get their booze.
Worse yet, because of how we dealt with Prohibition, it had an effect on how we dealt with other alcohol-related crimes like drunk driving. For decades afterward, we treated drunk driving like a nuisance instead of being a criminal act. Because, you know, “everyone did it”. Lives were lost, lives were destroyed, but that didn’t matter because “everyone did it”. Even when a concerted effort was made to treat drunk or impaired driving as a serious criminal act, there were still plenty of people who thought nothing of it because “everyone did it”.
Look at how the federal government dealt with the criminal activities that contributed to the housing bubble and the Great Recession. Before this, we threw execs in prison. Enron, WorldCom, hell, we threw Martha Stewart in prison! But then, after the markets collapsed and millions of Americans were thrown out of their homes, not one banking or market exec went to prison. Not one. Because the Department of Justice, in defiance of their own policies, decided they would rather file civil charges instead of criminal ones. That allowed the financial criminals to literally buy their way out of accountability with supposed “record” fines.
Did the Justice Department have something to gain from this? Well, the fines, certainly. But they could have gotten those with criminal charges. Or were they afraid to hold those banking and financial excs accountable?
What happened was that the next time there were financial screwjobs and outright criminal activity with one of those “too big to fail” institutions, not only did they get away with just paying penny-change fines, but they keep getting caught doing the same things over and over again.
This is what cowardice does, folks. It allows the criminal activity to go on and on without anyone paying the price and it encourages others to do the same, because they know they will never be held to account.
There is a certain narcissist who used to be the President of the United States that arrogantly boasted even before he was elected that he could shoot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it. As of this column’s date, it certainly appears that he is demonstrating it as he’s been able to get away with past actions.
New York City appeared to be on the brink of bringing charges, but a new District Attorney squashed that. Fulton County currently has a grand jury hearing testimony that could lead to indictments. A bipartisan January 6th Committee is holding public hearings, which have revealed potential criminal charges that could and should be filed.
And then there is the Department of Justice. The same department that dropped the ball when it came to going after the “Too Big To Fail” institutions during the Great Recession. They claim that they’re investigating the narcissist and the activities of the January 6th insurrection, but they haven’t really gone after too many of them for the major charges of sedition, and those they get convictions are serving jail time instead of prison time.
One has to wonder if they’re really serious on following through with going after the people at the top, the ones behind the insurrection, the ones that tried to overturn the 2020 Election so they could stay in power. There are too many people saying that nothing will become of this. That the orange narcissist will get away with his crimes in time to run for office again in 2024. Some are even questioning if there should even be criminal charges, because, of course, no other president had ever tried something like this before.
Personally, I find this kind of thinking to be outright wrong and criminal in and of itself. If you say that “no one is above the law”, then you cannot have anyone be considered out of reach. Anyone. President, governor, legislator, anyone. I would consider any prosecutor, any district attorney, any attorney general, who knows of criminal activity from people like that and refuses to follow through with charges and prosecution to be guilty of aiding and abetting by cowardice.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the cowardice to act in the face of outright criminal activity is just as corrupt as those who take bribes. Their failure to act lets people know that they can break the law as well, because they will either get away with it, or, at worst, they’ll pay a pittance of a consequence. Just look at the financial institutions and how they’ve been carrying on after the Great Recession if you don’t believe me. The old saying about evil triumphs because good men do nothing cannot be any clearer than that.
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