THE POWER AND PERIL OF STORIES

(This post is adapted from a speech delivered at a June 4, 2014 conference for educators sponsored by the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation.)

Our culture is literally awash in stories: tweets and posts on Facebook or Instagram, Pinterest boards, YouTube rants, and round-the-clock newscasts. We trade emails about TED Talks we like and pine for the next edition of Radiolab. Nearly everyone I know has participated in, or is preparing for, a storytelling slam.Telling a story is the easiest, most exciting way to explain a problem, describe a condition, make a friend, or sum up a situation. Stories are also an incredibly powerful teaching tool. 

Why?

We’re wired for them. Research indicates that stories are 22x more memorable than facts or bullet points because they activate, not just the language processing parts of our brain, but other parts as well: If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods are, our sensory cortex lights up. If they tell us a story that involves motion, our motor cortex gets active. Because our brains are always trying to make sense of what we are hearing, they are constantly seeking connections to whatever experiences we may have squirrelled away in memory.

Researchers at Princeton University found that a remarkable thing happens to our minds when we hear a story. Personal stories actually cause the brains of both storyteller and listener to exhibit what the study called “brain to brain coupling.” To put it simply, telling personal stories puts us in sync with the listener and helps forge human connections that are essential to our well-being.

They can make us stronger and more resilient. Studies conducted by Emory University psychologists over the past two decades appear to demonstrate that family narratives – about where one’s parents met and where they lived as children, about how a grandparent earned a living, or a setback that put the family in debt – actually foster resilience in children. The more children know about their past, the stronger their sense of control over their lives: indeed, researchers determined that familiarity with one’s family narratives was the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

So what of storytelling’s perils?

Just as narrative can be a powerfully positive force in our lives, it can limit, oversimplify, or silence. In a TED talk that has now enjoyed 7 million hits, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie reflects on the way in which stories - specifically, a single story with cultural currency -- can reduce a people or a country to stereotypes. That single story, she explains, can become the only story that we know. For example, she relates how her mother repeatedly described her family houseboy as poor. When Adichie visited him in his home village, she recalls being startled to enter a home in which she is shown beautiful baskets woven by the boy’s brother. “All I’d heard about my poor houseboy’s family is that they were poor so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”  It simply didn’t compute: poor people could not make or have such beautiful things.

In another TED talk economist Tyler Cowen regarded storytelling with a particularly jaundiced eye.

“I was told to come here and tell you stories,” he said, “but what I’d like to do is instead tell you why I’m suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact,” he continues, “the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get…The good and bad things about stories is that they’re a kind of filter. They take a lot of information and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in…”

We make sense of our lives, Cowen laments, by squeezing our choices and events into a single, manageable, perhaps heroic, narrative. “If I actually had to live those journeys and quests and battles,” he states, “it would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary…glory? It's fun for me - do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live?”

I found his message especially refreshing as a professional in human services who is asked often to share stories about our graduates. I used to like telling them. But they have begun to make me uncomfortable. A story captures a snapshot in time. On Wednesday I could tell you about a graduate who had enjoyed particular success – by Friday, she might have gone back to jail, relapsed, or been fired. Life is fragile and dynamic, particularly for many of the women with whom we work. Stories also skim over details that if examined closely might make the difference between a good program and a superior one. 

As funders and advocates, we hunger for stories that follow a particular arc: she was in prison and without hope; she enrolled in our program and developed skills; she graduated and now owns her own company. Some stories follow that line, but most don’t; they’re pocked by crises of confidence, misguided decisions, or a bout of bad luck. Now I don’t wait to trumpet the grand success but instead celebrate the small steps, with the hope that there will continue to be forward movement. It is more honest, and is fairer to the participant, who can be overwhelmed by our hopes and expectations.

Finally, in our zeal to share our stories we may drown others out.  We might offer our stories as a means of connecting with or supporting young people. But too often, I think, our voices crowd out those we need to hear or assert similarities where in fact there may be few.

Striking a Balance

We shouldn’t stop telling stories just because they’re tricky. Stories are critical if we’re to help young people figure out who they are and what they can become.

One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read is The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. I like it, not just because it is so beautifully written or because its story is compelling, but also because its author offers a portrait of parents who could be both abusive and tender, stunningly oblivious and surprisingly clear-eyed. A passage from the book describes a Christmas evening spent with her father, a gambling alcoholic who once offered his daughter to the winner of a pool game:

“When Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each one of us kids out into the desert night one by one. 

‘Pick out your favorite star’, Dad said.

‘I like that one!’ I said.

Dad grinned, ‘That's Venus", he said. He explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant and stars twinkled because their light pulsed.

‘I like it anyway,’ I said.

‘What the hell,’ Dad said. ‘It's Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.’
And he gave me Venus.

Venus didn't have any moons or satellites or even a magnetic field, but it did have an atmosphere sort of similar to Earth's, except it was super hot-about 500 degrees or more.

‘So,’ Dad said, ‘when the sun starts to burn out and Earth turns cold, everyone might want to move to Venus to get warm. And they'll have to get permission from your descendants first.’

“We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. ‘Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,’ Dad said, ‘you'll still have your stars.’

I was so confused by this – a sweet and enduring gesture from a man that two pages earlier I’d wanted to punch. But it is precisely why I loved this book and admire Walls. Her father is neither monster nor saint but a complicated tangle of contradiction. 

All of us, but particularly parents or professionals who work with children, need to recognize stories for what they are: a distillation, a way to organize and understand. As Cowen suggests, we should be discerning consumers of the stories we hear and wonder what might have been left out. We must also be as honest as possible in shaping the stories that we tell, maybe even leaving in the messy parts and foregoing a tidy ending. Human existence is essentially complex and often contradictory. Storytelling should be, too.  

And you know what? Not only can young people handle it – they need it.  

- Tiffany Bluemle

Off With Their Heads! Media Imagery and the Emotional Manipulation of the American Public

"Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, `and then,' thought she, `what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'" --Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 1865 (image public domain)

Beheading is a time-honored execution method.  France no doubt still holds the record in the beheading department, having knocked off about 40,000 a year at the height of the guillotine era. That glittering machine not only slid heads neatly off of necks at a fearsome pace, but it stood as a testament to Western scientific development, allowing gravity and leverage to make elegant, modern work of what otherwise requires brute force and a wickedly sharp blade.  Science was further advanced by the many impromptu studies of how long those decapitated heads maintained consciousness, with various doctors and witnesses counting how long the eyes of the severed caput continued blinking or turned to look at speakers. Great crowds watched these execution extravaganzas: In the days before the World Wrestling Federation, beheadings, like burnings-at-stakes, ripping-apart-on-the-rack, and other such solemn occasions, were grand entertainment. 

The response of Americans to beheadings in the news today is an interesting case study in the power of media and the role media agendas play in steering national opinion and policy.  

The first point of interest is that executing people in and of itself doesn't bother Americans. According to data from the Death Penalty Information Center American executions have skyrocketed since the early 1980s, going from averages of single digits per year to a new normal averaging about 50 a year every year since 2000.  Recent difficulties in procuring legal execution drugs have resulted in some outright gruesome executions in which the person being executed took far longer to die than he would have with a swift severing of the head. 

A mild, predictable round of head-shaking and muttering occurred after these botched American execution incidents, with some people complaining that the decedent did not suffer enough, and others protesting that we shouldn't be in the business of killing people. But there was no wave of hysteria, no demands that someone bomb Texas or Oklahoma to make them stop this barbarism. As a nation, we have no problem with the concept of executions -- we just want to split hairs over who can do them, by what method, and for what reason.

Americans also apparently have no trouble with other countries conducting executions. While the U.S. performs the 5th highest number of executions per year in the world, we are far overshadowed by the number 1 executioner, our chief trading partner China. Amnesty International has had a hell of a time getting accurate data, but it appears that several thousand people are executed each year in China, by lethal injection or firing squad. But there's no outcry to bomb China, either; in fact, virtually no condemnation whatsoever. Instead there are invitations to the White House and shiny new trade agreements. 

Which raises the second point of interest -- apparently beheading in and of itself doesn't bother Americans either. America's bosom buddy, the House of Saud, executes hundreds of people a year, many by beheading. While Americans have been gnashing teeth in outrage over the public beheadings of two Western journalists by the entity which American media calls the Islamic State, Saudia Arabia has been calmly wacking off heads with swords for such horrendous crimes as being mentally ill or committing adultery. 

Yet no one is demanding that we bomb Saudi Arabia. In fact, we are tightening our military alliances with them and taking public steps to demonstrate just how tight and secure the U.S. relationship is with this tyrannical oligarchy.  

Which brings us to the third point to ponder: Having already established that America doesn't care if people are executed -- in fact, we support the proposition -- and that America doesn't care if people are beheaded -- heck, our dear friends the sheiks do it all the time -- then why did a couple of beheadings by the group we call the Islamic State lead to such a vehement public reaction that we are expending millions of dollars to drop bombs into a multi-party armed conflict in Syria? 

The answer is the emotional impact -- often deliberately designed  and manipulated -- of media coverage of the incidents. We do not see our own executions, or the beheadings committed by Saudi Arabia, on the tv news or even on the internet. When they are mentioned, they are discussed as abstract data or in a context which makes them appear rational. 

Either the media, or powers-that-be which use the media to manipulate the public, have determined that the actions of IS are to be presented in a highly emotional context designed to foster a sense of fear and hysteria. Real information about what is going on in IS-held territories is hard to come by. Obviously there is war, and people are getting killed and run out of their homes and villages. It certainly behooves us out of simple empathy for our fellow humans to provide humanitarian aid to those caught in such crossfires. But what compels Americans to feel an urgent need to enter into a war in a venue in which we have no direct interest? 

In Iraq, some years ago, it was the theory that Saddam Hussein was a Nazi-like force of evil with weapons of mass destruction. Today, it's that IS is a Nazi-like force of evil that beheads people.  But atrocities are always alleged in war. (Name one war in which it was NOT alleged that the enemy was putting children's heads on pikes and raping women.)  Internet watchdog Snopes points out  the difficulties in determining the extent of beheadings and rapes occurring in the territories being taken over by IS -- and notes, by way of cautionary tale, that at least some of the pictures of beheaded individuals circulating which are attributed to IS have in fact been making internet rounds for years, attributed to various individuals or entities depending on the particular furor intended to be ignited.

Is a media-imagery-generated emotional response a good reason to go to war? In the present case it's hard to pinpoint any more rational explanation for the bombs we are presently dropping on Syria. Not only have we established that America doesn't mind executions or even beheadings, we also don't mind supporting rebels overthrowing established governments -- we've backed the revolutionaries on numerous occasions, and were already in the process of backing rebels seeking to overthrow the government in Syria, only now we only like some of those rebels and not others. 

Motivational speaker Justin Cohen rightly says that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures. We decide based on emotion and then look for a short dossier of facts to back up our emotional decisions. Since nothing moves emotions faster than story, and nothing conveys story faster than a few well-chosen visual images on commercial news media, it is frighteningly easy to manipulate the public of the most powerful nation in the world into going to war. Rest assured, however, that the photos of the women and children whose heads will be blown off by the bombs we drop, will never show up on the news. 

--Cindy Hill

Man's World

While it's a great thing to step back and consider the significant progress made in the last few decades towards social and economic equality for women, the fact is you never have to wait very long before encountering a stark reminder of just how much work is left to do.

The last couple weeks brought a bitter example right in our backyard.

Consider two biographies on the website of the Vermont Supreme Court. "Justice A"'s resume indicates a law degree from Suffolk Law School in Boston, followed by seventeen years of private practice in Vermont before being appointed to the High Court by Governor Douglas.

"Justice B"'s resume shows a law degree from the University of Chicago, followed by experience as a clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then 18 years of private practice in Vermont before being appointed by Governor Shumlin.

One of these two currently serving justices has recently had their qualifications for appointment to the court called into question, and by no less then a former Vermont Governor.

If you find yourself uncertain as to which of the two resumes above was found wanting, let me help; "Justice A" is a man (Chief Justice Paul Reiber), and "Justice B" is a woman (Associate Justice Beth Robinson).

In his recent autobiography, former Governor Jim Douglas openly casts aspersions on Justice Robinson's fitness for the Supreme Court, writing that "[Governor Shumlin] was a strong proponent of gay marriage. Since he was nominated by a scant 200 votes in the Democratic primary, their support may well have provided the margin of victory. He later reciprocated by appointing one of the leading lobbyists of the movement to the Vermont Supreme Court," referring to Robinson (big hat tip to John Walters and Mark Johnson for bringing this up).

For women, this is an all-too-familiar story. Rarely does a woman professional receive a significant promotion or appointment without jokes or open speculation that the recognition must be based on something other the merit, be it their appearance, the perception of quotas, a desire to be "politically correct," or - as in this case - as part of some underhanded deal or special arrangement.

The narrative is so pervasive that many women find themselves questioning their own worthiness when they are recognized for their own merit and accomplishments (See The Confidence Gap)

This is not to suggest that there are not instances of men's promotions being questioned, of course. The point is that for men, such challenges are the exception. Men are generally given the benefit of the doubt.

For women, though, there is frequently an implicit burden of proof to be met, as this sort of question is, more often than not, the norm. Having the charge so casually made by a former Governor (who himself appointed similarly-qualified male candidates to the Court), makes it a particularly bitter reminder of why talented, intelligent, accomplished women leaders continue to struggle to be taken seriously as full partners in so many of our business and governmental institutions.

- John Odum

Going There, part 1

© 2013 Kim Knox Beckius

Sorry. Been away for a while. Lots to do. But there's one thing that's been driving me nuts, and I can't keep quiet any longer.

Heady Topper: It's fine. Pretty good, even (and it's delightful to see The Alchemist doing so well).

But come on...

Discuss?

- John Odum (don't blame the others)

This is News?

In Wednesday’s NY Times, Tom Friedman reported on new Gallup research on what influences success and engagement at work (link here). What mattered the most? A supportive mentor and hands-on exposure to the field.

Friedman quotes Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup’s education division:

“Graduates who told Gallup that they had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being,’ Busteed said.

“Alas, though, only 22 percent of college grads surveyed said they had such a mentor and 29 percent had an internship where they applied what they were learning. So less than a third were exposed to the things that mattered most.”

From my perspective at Vermont Works for Women, exposure to a field and experience in using its tools is what opens the door to fields like construction, engineering, science or policing. Mentors make a particular difference in whether she is successful and stays. A 2009 report published by the National Research Council affirmed that women in science who had a mentor did better than women without one. In a survey of tenured female faculty in biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and physics, they found that assistant professors with no mentors had 68 percent probability of having grant funding versus 93 percent of women with mentors. That’s a twenty-five percent difference!

What surprises me about Friedman’s column is the way in which he appears to present these findings as new. Learning by doing has been endorsed through the ages by Da Vinci, Thoreau, Dewey, Kurt Hahn and John Holt. Bill Gates quit school to build computers; do we really need to be convinced of the value of applied learning? Mentors have had champions for centuries; one need look only to the ancient apprenticeship model, where mentors are a critical component of training.

Mentors and applied learning have proven their value, over and over again. The challenge, apparently, lies in applying what we’ve learned.

-- Tiffany Bluemle

Divide and Conquer: In the Great Abortion War, the Casualties are Women’s Lives

It’s the ideological battle of the century: Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life.  Let’s skip pondering how much each of those factions paid their high-priced marketing firms to come up with those positive-sounding monikers and go straight to the heart of the matter: As long as women remain locked in a claws-out, sparks-flying perpetual stranglehold over the legality of abortion, women will continue to be held back from political advancement, perceived as a one-issue constituent group.   

And in the real world, in hospitals on the poor side of the city, in small towns across America, and in villages across the world, women and children will continue to die of eminently preventable causes in childbirth and from childbirth complications like obstetric fistula that are not addressed or funded because the women with the most resources and political clout in the world – white middle and upper class American women – are busy funding and fighting the Abortion War.  Every time a woman sends her hard-earned, eighty-six-cents-on-the-dollar check to the National Right to Life Committee or NARAL, she has chosen to let another woman or baby die in childbirth while bolstering the one-horse-wonder political philosophy that abortion is the most important women’s issue.

Money is the sinew of war.  The most recent solid data I found reports that NARAL had a budget of over $11 million annually in 2008, and the National Right to Life Committee a budget of over $9.5 million in 2009.  I assume they’ve both gone up since then. And I assume (confirmed in part by research into some randomly selected state groups across the country) that all the myriad local components – every state chapter, local chapter, church group, etc. – has a combined budget in excess of that of the two major national organizations. A very conservative estimate would be that $50 million is spent annually on the pro and anti abortion debate in the United States.

Every battle has its ‘collateral damage.’ In a war of public rhetoric, high-paid lobbyists and paid advertisements, one way to describe that collateral damage is in terms of opportunities lost. The opportunities lost due to the abortion war are threefold.

First, the money sent to this battle could have, in a very real and immediate sense, been used to save the lives of women and children by paying for the set of medications commonly necessary in childbirth (about ten medical commodities, according to the UN, including injectable antibiotics, oral rehydration salts, and zinc, at a cost of about $6.40 per woman-giving-birth), and for procedures to repair childbirth injuries such as obstetric fistula surgery (which costs about $300 per woman). Whether your partisanship in the abortion war falls along the side of saving infant’s lives, or enhancing women’s autonomy and dignity, that $100 check will do a lot more of either if it’s sent to UNFPA’s Maternal Health Thematic Fund or to entities like Doctors Without Borders earmarked for maternal and infant health programs than if it’s sent to NARAL or the National Right to Life Committee to pay for lobbyists and magazine ads. 

Second, the intense media and public focus on abortion costs us the opportunity to discuss the vast array of other critical issues surrounding maternal and infant health, even at home in America. For example, the U.S. is the only western nation where the maternal mortality rate is on the rise. The maternal mortality rate in America was 6.6 per 100,000 live births in 1987, 12.7 in 2007, and according to the most recent figures available from the World Bank and WHO, 28 per 100,000 in 2013.  The maternal mortality rate for black women in the US is nearly three times as high as that for white women – meaning the odds of a black woman dying in childbirth in this US are higher than in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Iran. If we are to assume that the objective of the women who are carrying pro and anti abortion banners is actually to save the lives of women and children out of respect for all life and all families, rather than merely engaging in ideological debate for the sake of ideological debate, then they all should be collectively screaming in the streets over the U.S. maternal mortality rate.  Email Congress and the White House – I send Michelle Obama a weekly note on this issue but have yet to get a single reply – and send that $100 check to your local hospital earmarked to cover prenatal care for persons of limited resources.

Thirdly, by keeping all these intelligent, passionate, activist women who care deeply about reproductive health and the lives of women, children and families fighting with one another tooth and nail, the hyperbolic abortion debate costs us the opportunity to engage in dialogue designed to work productively towards our common interests. Enhanced reproductive health education. Development of easier-to-use, more effective, and less medically dangerous family planning methods. Community support for pregnant women and new mothers, especially those who are young and single. Removing toxins from our environment that harm fetal and maternal health. Support for increased participation of men in childrearing – financial, economic and physical – especially young unmarried fathers.

There will always remain a fundamental disagreement as to whether abortion should be legal or not, as well as whether it is a morally appropriate option, an unacceptable evil, or a necessary evil. But when nearly 300,000 women die globally each year in childbirth, and another million women suffer debilitating childbirth related injuries and infections – and ten million children die each year in infancy or early childhood – most of which could be prevented for very little money, you have to seriously question whether the pro and anti abortion activists are really much interested in ‘saving children’ or ‘enhancing women’s lives’ or if they are simply committed to fighting with one another.

 

I have tried for years to get any entity in Vermont to facilitate a dialogue between Vermont’s pro-life and pro-abortion contingents. I think that these factions have much to talk about – like why, despite Vermont having a stellar reputation in all aspects of health care and particularly children’s health, we have a merely average abortion rate – about 1 per every 6 lives births, or 1300 a year. Most Vermont abortions involve pregnant women in their early 20s – probably related to the high number of college students.  Wouldn’t it make sense for the women of Vermont—pro choice and pro life -- to work together on diminishing the unintended pregnancy rate in our state, and to reach out to see what the disconnect is at our colleges? To work together to clean up our waterways that present hazards to our unborn and growing children? To create stronger community networks to support young mothers financially, emotionally and physically? 

But apparently they’d all prefer to fight. With very rare exception, the response to my proposal that women of divergent views engage in meaningful dialogue has been met with facial expressions similar to those seen in response to the latest IS beheading video. I’ve been told, pointedly, by individuals from both sides, that they would NEVER talk to THOSE PEOPLE who disagree with them.

Like most wars, the partisans get wrapped up in their self identity as a warrior and lose sight of the underlying purpose of their cause. They’ll keep writing those checks to the side of their choice, even though that decision means they are knowingly standing by watching women and babies die completely preventable deaths in the U.S. and around the world.  They’ll keep waving those signs, marching on state capitals and Washington, pressing candidates to take a side, and telling women that you are either for us or against us. All while the solution to saving and improving the lives of women, children and families is right there in their hands: Stop fighting, start working.

--Cindy Hill

The Honest Co and the difference between B Corps and For Benefit Corporations

Last week almost immediately after posting about Bain Capital’s purchase of Toms a number of my friends sent messages to alert me to another high profile transaction, the Series C financing of Santa Monica based The Honest Co, (“THC”) in which THC raised $70MM at a post money valuation of close to $1BN.  The syndicate investors included many traditional venture capital funds.  Why is this significant?  First THC is a “B Corporation” and second THC is rumored to be considering a public offering.  I believe this would make THC the first certified B Corporation to go public and if this happens it will provide a case study for socially responsible investors.  Will the company command a premium or a discount at the offering?  Will investors flock to the company or will they shun it?  There is one other public company which is a certified B corporation but it received its designation after it went public.  There is a fairly comprehensive story on THC’s recent transaction here.  This article though continues to perpetuate some confusion as the terms “B Corporation” and “for benefit” corporation are typically used by the business press interchangeably..  They are not however, interchangeable. 

Let me offer a simple primer.  A Certified B Corporation is a company which has gone through a certification process administered by the non-profit corporation B Lab.  A company seeking to become certified fills out a self-assessment and submits this assessment to B Lab with necessary fees.  A B Lab staff person reviews the company’s self-assessment and spot audits some of the information provided in an assessment review.  B Lab’s standards advisory council has the final say in determining the certification. B Lab performs an onsite review of approximately 10% of its certified companies each year to verify the accuracy of the certification.  Companies must recertify every two years.

A “for benefit” corporation unlike a certified “B Corporation” has legal standing. 27 U.S. States have passed “for benefit” legislation which allow companies to elect “for benefit” status.  These “for benefit” laws vary on a state by state basis.  You can read Vermont’s “for benefit” statute here.  It’s important to note that a “for benefit” corporation is not necessarily a Certified B Corporation.   Under Vermont Law a “for benefit” corporation has to provide a specific public benefit in at least one of seven ways (see 11 VSA Chapter 21.03 (6)).  Vermont Statute requires that a “for benefit” director be appointed for each “for benefit” corporation and that the “for benefit” director submit an annual report to Vermont’s Secretary of State to report whether or not the company met its “for benefit” duties.  One would think there would be an easily accessible database of these “for benefit” corporation annual reports accessible at the Vermont Secretary of State website.  One would be wrong if one thought that.  However here are two examples of for benefit corporation reports: SunCommon and, King Arthur Flour.

Assuming you have read this blog post so far and visited and thoroughly read each of the links you might wonder what the reason is that a company would want to be chartered as a “for benefit” corporation.  The New York article I linked to in the first paragraph above cites perhaps the most often used justification for a “for benefit” statute; the “infamous” Ben and Jerry’s buyout by Unilever.  The theory is that had there been a “for benefit” law in Vermont when Unilever offered to buyout Ben and Jerry’s, the Ben and Jerry’s board would have not taken the offer and the for benefit statute would have provided the legal cover.  For those that subscribe to that point of view I suggest a thorough read of this article which does a good job of debunking that theory.  Take the time to read the comments because there is some good give and take between the authors and the “B Lab” folks. Interestingly in my opinion the testimony the Vermont legislature received when crafting the “for benefit” statute a few years ago was centered on protecting the “next” Ben and Jerry’s like buyout. 

I am not a believer that form of business organization or certifications are the way to achieve social responsibility in corporations.  In fact I would argue that codification in statue or in a certification process can provide an “easy out” from tough nuanced decisions that must be made by shareholders, managers and boards. A company is comprised of human beings with all of their foibles and flaws.  If humans are willing to “do the right thing” when operating a company, then the outcome will likely be responsible no matter the corporate structure or the certifications. If they are not, then no matter of law or process will produce a responsible outcome.

Cairn Cross

One of these quotes is not like the others...

There are things that used to make me really angry that nowadays just get me depressed.

But anyway... 5 quotations presented for your consideration. All are from political officeholders, but only one is from a Vermont State Representative.

1. "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

2. "Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings..." Patrick Henry

3. "If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it." - Abraham Lincoln

4. "Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

5. 

- John Odum

Is Suicide-by-Cop a New Service Offered by Law Enforcement?

How Should Police Respond to Mental Health Crisis Calls?
Photo: Cindy Hill

The 'other' St. Louis-area police shooting of this past summer involved the death of 25-year-old Kajieme Powell about 15 seconds after two city law enforcement officers reached the curb in their cruiser. The cops were responding to two 9-1-1 calls--one indicating that Powell had stolen a couple of sodas from a mini-mart, the other indicating that Powell had a knife in his pocket and was acting strangely.

One remarkable thing about this incident is that it was recorded on cell-phone video from start to finish. That video has been removed from YouTube because of its grisly content (the shooting and death was an order of magnitude more subtle than the average tv and movie shooting incident, but there's something about its actual realness that turns blood to ice), but it is still available embedded in many online news articles.

Race, socioeonomic status, age, environment, and the presence of a small knife in Powell's hand might all have played a role in the officers' decision to exit their vehicle with guns drawn, hesitate for a swift couple of seconds in which Powell took the last steps of his life -- first away from, then, jumping up on a low concrete dividing wall, down a driveway ramp towards the police -- then open fire.

But the factor which overwhelmingly tipped the scales towards the irreversible termination of this young man's life was the fact that he loudly, repeatedly, authoritatively, commanded the officers to "Shoot Me. Shoot Me Now.  Shoot Me."  To viewers of the videotape, this fatal monologue was foreshadowed by Powell placing the soda cans on the sidewalk just a few seconds earlier, muttering something suggesting that he was going to be laying there himself.

Mr. Powell committed suicide-by-cop.  He's hardly unique in this. Examples abound in every corner of the country, including representational instances here in Vermont.  Mass shootings at schools and workplaces tend to be variations on this theme in which the individual is not content to steal sodas then walk up to the two responding police officers and ask to be shot, like Mr. Powell did, but rather help to guarantee the end result by a more flamboyant blaze-of-glory incident just to be sure no one stands around saying, 'Gee, do you think we should taze him instead of blowing his head off?'

So, when a guy wants someone to shoot him, should we send the police out to oblige?

The question is just the tip of the iceberg of a discussion we are all not having about the huge and growing role of law enforcement, courts and jails as 'solutions' to mental, and sometimes physical, health crises. The 1989 U.S.Supreme Court decision that guides prosecutors, grand juries, and juries in determining whether to charge or convict a police officer of excessive use of force is particularly interesting because it involved a man who was suffering from an episode of low blood sugar related to diabetes.  It is not uncommon for individuals suffering from diabetes, epilepsy, or other physical health conditions including medication conflicts or withdrawals, to run into confrontations with law enforcement officials, often ending up at the receiving end of considerable force or restraint -- sometimes even death.  Often individuals experiencing such events can not hear, or can not respond to, officer instructions to stop or kneel or drop what is in their hands.  Sometimes they may be flailing or cursing as part of the pattern that precedes a seizure or blackout.

The standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court requires prosecutors, grand juries and juries to consider what a reasonable police officer, in light of their knowledge, training and concern for other members of the community, would do if faced with exactly the same circumstances. If the person is acting strangely, appearing agitated, does not respond to commands, then by law a level of force, up to and including deadly force, can be legally used to subdue that individual.

With a steeply increasing percentage of our population taking pharmaceuticals for mental health issues -- anxiety, depression, ADD -- these conflicts and their often deadly results seem to be getting all the more common.  We are faced with a disconnect between the law of what the police CAN do -- what they are legally authorized to do -- and the ethics of what they SHOULD do.  Just because you are allowed to do something legally doesn't mean you necessarily should assume it's the right thing to do. And yet, how do we go about training police officers to follow established protocols for community safety on the one hand, yet exercise the ethics of discretion on the other?

Much is made today of our high incarceration rate, but a hundred years ago, we had the same percentage of our population locked in institutions. The difference is that a hundred years ago, 80% of that institutionalized population was in mental hospitals, and 20% in jails. Today those percentages are more than inverted.

In the days of those big scary mental institutions, there was another response option to the person 'acting strangely' or threatening suicide -- the men in the white coats with straight jackets. When we as a society collectively determined that large mental institutions and those guys with the straight jackets were inhumane, we did not create any alternative to take their place.  (I'll refrain from making a comment here about how the US likes to throw over foreign tyrants without having any idea what to put in their place, either. But, it's about the same thing.) You can call an ambulance -- but if the person is bouncing around or swinging or throwing things, the ambulance personnel will ask for police back-up. There's no other choice. There's no middle ground.

Even the legal standard itself is highly subjective. There is no checklist, there is no explicit court ruling that lists precise actions or timelines required; instead, prosecutors, grand jurors and jurors have to compare the standard to the facts and determine if the officer's actions were legally warranted by the circumstances.  In some cases the answer is clear: the armed robbery in progress, the person holding a hostage at gunpoint, and similar situations where lives are in immediate danger. Most policing cases are not blessed with that kind of clarity.

John Odum recently proposed that we militarize the police, by which he meant that we should urge greater standardization of police responses. The problem with attempting to do so is that the myriad of mental health crises to which police get called can not be put into the boxes of a checklist rubric. Let's say we accept as a rule that police can shoot 25 year old black men holding a pocketknife and saying 'Shoot Me.' Do you also shoot the 89 year old wheelchair bound woman in a nursing home who is throwing her food tray and yelling 'Shoot Me'? How about the 13 year old girl sitting in her basement cutting herself with a broken bottle after being harassed at school, while muttering 'Shoot Me'?  Can we come up with a standardized response -- that police should always execute such individuals, or perhaps that they should never do so?

Or, instead of arm-wrestling over police protocols, do we find some approach other than sending police to mental health crises calls? I'm not suggesting that we return to the nightmare of ghost-filled psychiatric institutions and those guys who are coming to take you away -- but I am suggesting that if we truly want our police responding to mental and physical health crises, we better make that clear and provide them with considerably more appropriate training on the subject, or that we supplement that response with adequate crisis intervention resources.

In the video of Powell's death, one individual in the crowd of onlookers--just one-- attempts to engage in conversation and divert the situation, shouting out an admonition that this isn't the way to do it. That lone voice was the only attempt made to address Powell's painful circumstances and turn them into something other than just another suicide-by-cop.  That lone voice was right -- this isn't the way to do it.

--Cindy Hill 

The Supply-Side Election

There's a lot of concern and shock over the low, sub-ten-percent voter turnout at last week's primary. The concern is that its a signal of voter apathy, and a lack of confidence in our democratic institutions. There are also those suggesting that it's a sign that moving the primary to earlier in the year is a failure.

Eh. Fugeddaboudit.

The Primary and General elections are different animals. Apples and oranges. Most people vote - one way or the other - to impact the agenda, and the public agenda is always on the ballot in the General election as the different parties send forth their appointed champions into the arena.

Primaries can have that quality too, but more often than not they don't, and voters know that well. Ballot lines this year were generally either uncontested, or only marginally contested. Whereas the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2000 offered voters a high-profile, hard-fought struggle between five viable candidates - most of whom had a real fighting chance at emerging victorious - this year was a little less compelling for the typically-engaged Democratic voter ("Hm! I'd better rush out so Peter Welch can win 301-0 in my town instead of only 300-0!!"). Without a real marquee battle, turnout was left to those that strongly identify as associating with one party or another, and in a state without party registration (where, essentially, every voter is an independent from the get-go - and don't think for a second that this fact doesn't strongly impact the psyche of the Vermont voter - there are a lot of proud independents in this state!), that's not a big number.

A number probably...well... just about 10 percent.

Maybe if there had been a few more weeks for the Feliciano write-in campaign to catch fire. Maybe if there had been enough time for the Corren write-in effort to spread meaningfully beyond the Burlington-Montpelier corridor, and the Phil Scott write-in forces had fully engaged. But neither happened, so you had a sort of baseline, voting-is-my-duty election turnout.

Now a 10 percent turnout in November would absolutely be a cause for civic panic - but that's truly the "demand side" election, if you will. Voters turn out for that because there is always an impact on public policy that emerges from the result, and people want a say in that.

Think of the primary as the "supply side" election. There's not an immediate policy impact, so what drives turnout is, instead, the supply of meaningful, inspiring, and motivating candidate choices to vote for.

This year options were a bit, shall we say, limited. Not to say any of them were bad, just limited in number.

So don't worry about it. Nothing to see here. November will bring a plenty big turnout, I guarantee.

John Odum

Looking for Mr. (Ms?) Right

Although becoming an official vote-counter has meant leaving behind my career of promoting, disparaging and actively trying to impact the fortunes of candidates, I remain an avid student of the game, so to speak. As such I am left scratching my head about the recently-passed primary election - specifically the GOP gubernatorial primary - and asking one question:

What the hell?

It's, of course, the write-in campaign of Libertarian Dan Feliciano that I'm WTHing about. Or perhaps more accurately, the write-in campaign against Scott Milne that happened to use Dan Feliciano's identity. Or no, more accurately still - the write-in-campaign against Phil Scott and David Sunderland that, rather than take on Phil Scott directly, co-opted Dan Feliciano and the Libertarian crowd in some sort of flanking maneuver.

There. Got all that?

Now, none of this is to question the sincerity of Feliciano and the Libertarians. This was win-win for them. But they have to know they were used as the latest pawns in the post-Douglas balkanization of the statewide GOP that many of us assumed was over. Apparently, not so much.

It's not worth rehashing the power struggles between the more moderate "Phil Scott" wing of the state Republican Party, and the more conservative (or maybe more precisely, the "more combative") wing - which I suppose can now be referred to as the Darcie Johnston wing, given her persistence as a force in the struggle - going so far as to publicly initiate the Feliciano write-in effort.

It is worth wondering what, exactly, was the end game supposed to be, here? Electoral politics are all about lining up all the variables and staying in control of as many as possible, all the time. That's organizng 101. The Johnston-motivated Feliciano effort was never in control of anything at all. What's even stranger, then, was to see it joined by (presumably) wiser conservative voices such as Brady Toensing and John McLaughry.

Now it is important to remember that, in electoral politics, its not always necessary to win. Often, a good solid place - or even show - can send the message you want to send. A solid second place showing from a conservative-backed candidate could've had that effect here - but that's not what happened.

And let's be clear: that was never going to happen. This was as big - and as weird - of a political Hail Mary as I've ever seen. Given the timing, the level of organization, the extra-partisan nature of the candidate, the fact that it was a write-in effort, the fact that it was a primary... there was only one way this was going to go. And now consider the effect.

• After relatively narrow losses within the party infrastructure, the Johnston wing just got itself crushed quite publicly.
• Phil Scott - who was the real target of the Johnston-wing - can now say he is such a juggernaut that ehis enemies felt that a weird write-in campaign like this one was a better bet to politically harm him than trying to take him on directly. Talk about empowering your enemy.
• By reaching outside the party, the Johnston wing has potentially alienated itself from GOP rank and file.
• Any ability to say "I told you so" if Shumlin badly beats Milne in the General has been wiped out with an easy "look who's talking" smirk.

I just don't get it. What was the endgame? What was the point?

If nothing else, it shows that the vacuum created by the retirement of Jim Douglas is still very much the operative dynamic. One might have thought that a return of Douglas might be the only thing to remedy the situation, but Douglas's endorsement of Milne probably refutes that once and for all. For all the damage that Mr. Douglas may have done to down-ticket party organization by so exclusively tasking the State Committee resources to his own electoral interests, the fact remains that the guy was a political Marshall Tito that somehow - beyond anyone's real understanding - was able to keep Vermont republicans from going to war with themselves from cycle to cycle.

It could be that things don't get better for the GOP until a new Douglas comes along. Hard to really know if that's true when you don't really know how Douglas pulled that off in the first place.

What's more likely is that, not entirely unlike the Vermont Democrats in the 90s, the simmering feuds and conflicts that boiled over just need more than just an election cycle or two to burn themselves out. We shall see.

John Odum