“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot
As we ring in the New Year, the news is full of accounts of the High and the Mighty and their great plans to do us good in an awful hurry. The question of whether we want good done to us is regarded as of no consequence.
The more of life I see, the more I appreciate the truth of Eliot’s observation.
In national politics, importance means accomplishing Great Reforms, or eliminating Great Evils. Nobody promises just to be a capable executive, frugally administer public funds, and cautiously tweak the system to see if some improvements can be made. Indeed it’s doubtful if anyone could get elected running on such a platform.
In journalism, importance means breaking The Story of the Century. (How many have we read in the first decade of this century so far?) Nowadays big time journalism regards itself as the fourth branch of government and a mighty Force for Good, rather than the watchdog of a free people.
Case in point. Last week I watched journalism goddess Lesley Stahl on former Republican Governor Mike Huckbee’s show on FOX. They were commemorating the life of legendary journalist/producer Don Hewitt, who founded the “television news magazine” 60 Minutes in 1968.
Stahl described how she started at 60 Minutes in 1991. A few years ago she had to take a $500,000 pay cut so CBS could afford Katie Couric ($15 million per year,) but still makes a reported $1.8 million per year.
Stahl’s first journalistic coup was an expose of the baby selling market in Romania. She posed as an American woman trying to buy two handsome boys, ages six and eight years, from their mother for $2,000. Huckabee ran clips of the piece, showing Stahl and a middleman haggling with the mother, right in front of the kids.
Baby selling! The very words invoke horror. As opposed to a civilized American adoption where the agency gets exorbitant fees and the mother nothing.
“We shut them down,” Stahl crowed, as Huckabee nodded appreciatively.
I had a different reaction. You see, I’ve been to Romania too.
Five years after that broadcast I relocated from Poland to Bulgaria by train. The trip included a four-hour stopover in Bucharest. By the time I got on the train to Sofia, I didn’t know whether to get out of the country and never come back, or stay and join a religious order.
Because communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu mandated high birth rates while impoverishing the country, the capitol was full of abandoned children. For blocks around the train station, no manhole had a cover, because the children where living in the tunnels under the streets.
I saw legions of filthy children begging. Some showing off hideous orthopedic deformities, some sniffing glue in corners. many reportedly HIV positive.
Though I lean lukewarm against the death penalty, I’m glad they killed that monster and his wife. (Yes I know, the trial was a farce and the verdict a forgone conclusion. Guess what? Don’t care.)
When I went back a few years later, the children were gone. I like to think they’re being cared for. But I didn’t ask.
Any mother in those circumstances who loved her children would joyfully send them to America with a loving family, even at the cost of never seeing them again. I’ve known two lovely, healthy, and intelligent young women raised by American families who found them abandoned on their doorsteps, in India and Korea respectively. They bless the mothers they never knew.
But you shut them down Lesley, you and 60 Minutes.
Congratulations.
A collection of Steve Browne’s essays and newspaper columns, “The View from Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life in the 21st Century” is available on Amazon Kindle.