More On Piling On

I wrote a piece about piling on yesterday. I posted it thinking it was one of my weaker posts. Then I saw this excellent piece at Coyote Blog and felt a bit vindicated:

I have a guy, who I won't name for privacy reasons, who works for me in Arizona.  Over 10 years ago, barely over 18, he was convicted of some non-violent drug crimes and locked away.  Had I done the same things in my youth, my rich dad likely would have kept me out of jail but as a poor Hispanic in the world of Sheriff Joe's Phoenix, he went to jail.  Over ten plus years later, he had a stable marriage and had his civil rights restored, but was still mostly doing minimum wage labor.   He has been a good, reliable maintenance person at one of our campgrounds, in a job where he could work with his wife.  One day a customer got in some sort of dispute with this man's wife, looked him up online, and found he had a prison record.   This customer then started sending me messages that I must fire this person immediately or else this customer would file suit against us for creating a dangerous environment for her.  When I refused, she then started posting yard signs around town that we hired felons and telling people on social media that they needed to shun our maintenance guy in any number of ways and accusing him of running a narcotics ring out of the campground.
 This is the kind of crap that non-violent drug offenders face their entire lives.  And you wonder why some of them, after finding no work and being shunned by civil society, might turn to crime?

This nosy customer is an awful person. She is effectively demanding that an ex-con never be allowed to re-engage with society. What’s the solution? Keep everyone locked up forever for even the most trivial offense? This is exactly the kind of piling on that I’m complaining about in yesterday’s post. Kudos to the author for ignoring her complaints and standing behind his worker. The temptation to cave to this kind of pressure must be strong. (Am I "piling on" on her? I don't think so, because I don't know who she is. The post is shaming a behavior, not a person. I would attack the behavior and not the person even if I did know who she was.)

Another thing happened yesterday. My four-year-old had had a bad day at his daycare. He’s sometimes aggressive and takes toys from the other kids, and this was just one of those days. He was crying and sitting with the teacher. As soon as I walked in, the other children were regaling me with his list of offenses. The teacher told them to quiet down, that he was the teacher, that he’d already punished my son. (It was very sweet. He picked up my son, who was sobbing, and they gave each other a big hug. “Tomorrow is another day. We can do better.”) My boy knew he’d done bad. He didn’t need his entire peer group piling on.

I see the nosy customer in the same light as I see my kid’s tattling class-mates. The impulse to indulge moral superiority is strong, particularly when it's against someone you don't like or have an outstanding dispute with. But it’s childish to cave to this impulse.

The title of this post is kind of mean if you read it as a pun. It's intentional.