Thursday, March 10, 2005

NEPOTISM IS CORRECT: AMONG "NATIVE" PEOPLE

From New Zealand:

Tariana Turia says hiring family members is not necessarily a bad thing. And she's not alone. Anthony Hubbard reports on the virtues of nepotism.

Nepotism used to be considered a vice, like theft or child abuse. Now the ancient practice has found new defenders. Maori Party leader Tariana Turia says that leaders of Maori organisations are justified in hiring family members. In the United States, Adam Bellow, son of the Nobel-prize winning novelist Saul Bellow, has published a much-discussed book called In Praise of Nepotism. So is nepotism so bad?

Maori don't even use the N-word, Turia told a newspaper. "We see it more as whanaungatanga (kinship)." Turia argued that because Maori organisations are in the spotlight, "you are going to put people into positions who you know that you can trust and who are going to be loyal". That means favouring relatives - although the relative, of course, has to be competent to do the job.

Professor Margaret Mutu of Auckland University's Maori Studies department agrees. In a Maori-oriented organisation, she says, if there are two equally qualified applicants, preference will be given to the one more closely related. "Their whole relationship, their whole whakapapa forces them to be loyal . . . It's not so much that the stranger is going to be disloyal, but the stranger will have no extra ties which will get them to stay when the going gets rough." A member of the whanau will also look out for the overall well-being of the people, because they are part of it.

Hiring relatives who were unable to do the job, however, or giving them special treatment would attract fierce criticism, she says. "Jealousy is a big driver in Maoridom. Anyone getting extra treatment, you can bet your bottom dollar Maoridom will jump on it.".....

Mutu says there are strong Maori sanctions against corruption. "There are all sorts of checks and balances in place that are actually far greater than in the Pakeha world." In her own work in her Kiwi organisation and as chairwoman of two marae, "I've got to account for every decision I make and every action I do."

Theft and corruption are unacceptable in Maori society, she says, and Maori often blow the whistle on those in their own organisations. "Oh hell, yes - that's why you see it splashed all over the newspapers. You rarely see it from the Pakeha world."

Pakeha commonly think Maori are a bit casual with money. In fact, "what you've got is that Maori are not very expert in how to handle the cash. They get caught out". Maori do not have hundreds of years of experience of a cash-centred culture, "so we have to learn to use it the best way we can, and I can tell you we often make mistakes with it".

More here. Commentary on Daily Bork



ZERO TOLERANCE IN SCHOOLS: A 21ST CENTURY MASS INSANITY OUTBREAK

What should have been a minor incident at an Ocala, Fla., elementary school has attracted national attention because of the school's response. Two boys, aged 9 and 10, were charged with second-degree felonies and taken away in handcuffs by the police because they drew stick figures depicting violence against a third student. There was no act of violence, no weaponry. According to news reports, the arrested children had no prior history of threatening the student depicted in the drawing. The parents were not advised or consulted. The school's immediate response was to call the police and level charges "of making a written threat to kill or harm another person."

The incident was not an aberration but one of three similar occurrences in the Florida school system during the same week. In another case, a 6-year-old was led away in handcuffs by police. And those three incidents are only the ones that managed to attract media attention. Another indication that the incident is not an aberration: The police have adamantly and repeatedly defended the slapping of cuffs and felony charges onto the 9 and 10-year-olds.

Arresting young children for a crayon drawing, not unlike the games of hangman we once all played, is the ultimate meaning and logic of Zero Tolerance. Zero tolerance involves the application of law in an extreme and uncompromising manner to any activity, violent or not, that is deemed to be anti-social. It applies to everyone, regardless of circumstances such as age, intent or prior history. Zero tolerance has spread through society largely due to the reasonable fear with which people have responded to the school shootings at Columbine and the still-stunning tragedy of Sept. 11. The fear is reasonable. But the ongoing response is not.

No one -- not the police, not the government, no school official -- has the right to brutalize a child for using crayons. And the people who reasonably supported zero tolerance as a way to make schools safer never envisioned a police state in which 6-year-olds are handcuffed. Parents are finally saying "NO!"

The battle against zero tolerance is being waged on the local and state level. One such local battlefield is in Katy, Texas. One such parent is Derek Hoggett. His 13-year-old daughter Gabrielle was suspended from school due to a butter knife packed in her lunch. Because of braces, Gabrielle needed the knife -- a legal item -- to cut an apple. No violence nor threat occurred. Hoggett explained, "She was given the harshest punishment for a first offense even though school officials admitted in a letter ... that she was a student with exemplary behavior and high academic standing." Gabrielle's school district has reportedly investigated "2,149 criminal incidents, issued 779 citations and made 108 arrests" in the past several months.

Because of the avalanche of investigations, Fred Hink -- a spokesman for the parents' rights organization Katy Zero Tolerance -- accuses the school official of having no "common sense." He claims "they do not appropriately address issues such as disability considerations, due process and the long-range effects of placing children in alternative education programs." (The alternative education programs to which children like Gabrielle are often transferred are widely criticized as substandard and stigmatizing to the child. Thus, the transfer damages their futures.).....

What are the parents demanding? There is no one set of requests, but some demands appear repeatedly. First and foremost, the parents want immediate involvement in severe forms of discipline. This means the parents of the aforementioned 9 and 10-year-olds would have been allowed to discipline their children before police were called to impose felony charges. Gabrielle's father could have explained to her that butter knives were inappropriate instead of the school suspending her.

Parents also want an appeals process. Moreover, the parents of Katy request "the establishment of a civilian oversight committee" to review police actions against school children. It is difficult to criticize parents who demand "due process" for children who are too young to speak for themselves. To me, those parents live up to the best definition of being a mother and father.

More here

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