Things I Know I Know

One of my jobs is to supervise a telephone support line. After what was a long day on the phones recently, I came downstairs and said, I'm looking for things to put on the web site. What should we tell people to remember?

One of the guys looked at me and said, Tell them--Remember. Don't be stupid.

If you're looking for a personal mission statement, you could do worse than this. Because people often do phenomenally stupid things--like build giant new stores smack in the middle of a flood plain--and then when inevitable disaster strikes, say, well, how could we have known?

Because you're engineers?

Because it's a flood plain?

I knew. The people living next door to me knew. Children who saw the last flood knew. Everyone knew.

Or, maybe you remove regulations and protections and gut anti-trust laws and make sure the balance of capital and labor skews strongly to one side. And then, when corporation after corporation pops up with readjusted earnings, when we find out dozens of people manipulated companies for their own short-term stock option gain, when we see that the lying and cheating and stealing went on all over, everywhere, at the expense of the community and the workers and the stockholders, we raise our hands to our cheeks and say, but how could we have known?

Please.

Don't be stupid. Don't expect me to be stupid. I don't really care about punishment and jail time and the amount we'd have to spend to prosecute some of these yahoos. But I do want something. I want them to stand up and say:

You were right and we were stupid.