JULY 29, 2004
On the dangers of playing "follow the leader"
by Leigh Barret
We expect a whole lot more from our teenagers than from our government leaders. Iíve decided this after observing the media during this past month. The news was full of the news that British and US intelligence analysts had provided faulty information regarding Iraq and their possession of chemical and biological weapons. Their analysis of the potential danger was overblown, decided the US Senate Intelligence Committee and sometimes was based on information culled from third parties.
Teaching our kids about standing up to their peers during teenage and young adulthood is probably the most difficult tasks we face as parents. If all goes well, our children make it out to the far side of the teens and early twenties, confident in who they are, able to think for themselves and defend their own position. We hope they are able to say, "No thanks I don't smoke, or No I've had enough to drink, or Hey this isn't right, or I don't agree, let's try something else".
Both countries launched investigations and decided that their information gathering services had failed, both countries decided that their intelligence agencies were "victims" -- Victims of "group think"... otherwise known as peer pressure. Their victim status wiping clean any responsibility for their actions. Yes, the top guy at the CIA, George Tenet had all the blame heaped on him, in his case the buck stopped with him, removing the need to go higher up the chain of command. But for the most part, all of the other responsible parties went their merry way.
How? Why? I'm nearly knocked over at the thought of it. Apparently none of these adults, making decisions regarding going to WAR (!) was able to say, "hey folks, this isn't a good idea, we don't have any proof"! So we went to war, and many many people have died and no one in the government, neither the US nor the UK is to blame for lying to all of us citizens and to the rest of the world . . . and we let them do it and get away with it.
When I was a teenager, and faced with the peer pressures of staying out late, driving fast and drinking beer, my mother's weekly refrain to "all my friends are doing it" was, "if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?" My answers varied according to mood . . . did I want to get her off my back? Then I groaned "ugh, of course not" and escaped as quickly as possible. Sometimes I was feeling cocky, though and I remember more than once answering, "Sure I'd jump off a bridge, if I could do it and get away with it!"
Listening to and watching the media reports, it is clear that the folks who are getting off easy by blaming "group think dynamics" are once again trying to lull us to sleep with cute phrases. If your college kid called you from jail after a riotous night of causing mayhem downtown, would you be likely to fall for the excuse that "everybody else was doing it"?
If it is ludicrous to think we would swallow that excuse coming from the mouth of a teenager, then why do we put up with it from adults, especially when those adults literally hold the future of our entire world in their itchy-trigger-fingers?
Right now, in the US, people are rallying behind one party or another in preparation for the November presidential elections, and this isn't a bad thing. It takes a certain amount of group energy to launch new ideas. We can't accomplish anything when we are all running in three hundred million different directions.
But in the daily running of our towns, our states, and our nations, we need to put the value back on freedom of expression, the right to follow one's conscience and the necessity to perhaps be the one voice of dissent in a group whose members are too insecure to think for themselves.
We must speak up as individuals, demand those in positions of power take responsibility for their actions and provide a good example the young people who are next in line as leaders of the country. We need to demand the same level of maturity and trustworthiness of our countries' leaders that we demand of our children. If we don't do these things, then we may as shut our mouths and let our kids go play on the highway, for then we too are guilty of playing a game of "follow the leader".
Leigh Andrea Barret is a writer, teacher and co-editor for The Journal of Women Thinking and Acting for Peace. She can be contacted at femmepeace@yahoo.com