Even when I was very young, I knew that my dad had gone successfully through several huge ethical fogs.  Several years before Dad met my mom, he turned down an unethical but lucrative job at the height of the great depression.  When I was just six months old, he blew a whistle on his powerful embezzling boss, a college president. Four years later, soon after Dad’s testimony helped send the boss to jail, Dad turned down another lucrative but unethical job at a social service agency.

As a child, of course, I didn’t understand the full impact of these stories. As an adult, I got enough details about whistleblowing and its impact to fill a book.

In the end, Dad’s only regret  was that no one had stopped the president when the wrongdoing was small, by saying simply, “No, Dr. Meadows, you can’t do that.”  Over the years, I also learned a lot about the stress of Dad’s whistleblowing on our family, and I healed.

What was left after the forgiveness and healing were some very powerful life lessons in basic integrity.  May they also serve you.

Integrity Tip 1:  Discover And Strengthen Your Integrity Signals

Each of us has a set of unique signals that let us know when we’re in or out of integrity, whether we call those signals our North Star, our touch stone, our inner compass.  Or my favorite, which I learned in Dad’s shop, the level and plumb which have helped carpenters build on true and on the level for over 5,000 years.

For Dad, moral disgust was visceral, like the feeling of being kicked in the gut when he realized what that his boss was embezzling. We once talked about the feeing of moral uplift — that warm feeling you may get in the upper chest in the presence of goodness–or the quiet buzz I sometimes get in the upper back, when you know things are on true or on the level.

Integrity Tip 2: Feed and Exercise Your “Integrity Muscle”

Dad often got integrity guidance from intuition or memories.  The first time Dad was offered an unethical job, he was helping to tear down an old, unsafe bridge when the boss offered to cut him in on a deal to paint the old parts to look like new, then underbid other contractors on a job in another county.

Standing along on what was left of the old bridge, Dad felt a moment of temptation.   “With so many people going bankrupt,” he thought, “you could even help your mama buy the farm she’s always wanted.” Just then a Canada goose flew close by.  It eyeballed Dad and seemed to say, “You know you’re got to do the right thing.”

For the first time in his career, Dad lost his footing. As he scrambled for balance, he imagined crashing onto the rocks below, then being swept down the rapids to death or severe injury. That’s when he remembered Psalm 121, which he had memorized as a child:  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.  My help is in the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

The psalm then promised that God would not allow him to stumble or fall, that he would be guarded from evil, “both now and forever.” That helped him regain his footing and affirm his refusal to be part of corruption.

Integrity Tip No. 3:  Don’t Stand Naively Alone When You It’s Your Turn to Speak Out

Dad was lucky to have the support of several other faculty members who also blew the whistle.  A local politician connected him to the State Bureau of Investigation, and after the third try, he got the support of a great lawyer to protect himself. Dad also prayed a lot.

Whistleblowers have a lot more support today, starting with the Government Accountability Project (www.whistleblower.org). If Dad were speaking out today, he could benefit from a great therapist who understands how to alleviate stress.

And if you don’t already know how to document key information, get an attorney to teach you what you need to record and how to do it.  Assume that once you’ve spoken out, people who now seem like friends may be offered huge incentives to deny what they now admit is the truth. So get that truth in writing, before you go public.

Integrity Tip No. 4:  Don’t Take on Too Much.

Too many whistleblowers become obsessed with fixing the whole problem, winning a personal vendetta or being a martyr.  I grew up with inflated notions of all I thought I had to do to live in integrity, given my idealized image of my father.

My best ally here has been Rhena Schweitzer Miller, daughter of my lifetime hero, Albert Schweitzer.  While interviewing her once, I got the image that it’s possible to wear a powerful parental legacy or a calling as lightly as one wears a chiffon scarf.  Another ally is my minister, Rev. Dr. Patricia Keel, to seek guidance on what is mine to do, what is not.  To the extent I have courage to do that which really calls me and ignore my ego’s demand that I do something grand, I’m more likely to be in integrity.  I also get to have a great life while doing what’s I know to be right, because part of being in integrity is being whole and true to myself.

So what about you?  What stories and resources help you know, stay in or return to integrity?  What tips can you offer from your life or role models?

As always, many blessings

Pat McHenry Sullivan

Almost all the people I told about the writing gig made what they thought was a joke:  “Whistleblowers?  Oh, you mean ratters? Snitches?  Stool pigeons?” Given my father’s story, and given the 95-5 odds that my mother’s early death from a rare illness was caused by the FDA’s lack of attentiveness to under-reported side effects of a popular prescription drug, it’s amazing I didn’t do bodily harm to those jokers.

Today, it’s still considered okay to slander whistleblowers, then wonder why more people don’t speak out to warn us about fraud, waste or abuse.  And there are many who are so focused on not being “negative thinkers” or buttinskies or poor team players that we become complicit in all types of wrongdoing.  Fortunately, there are a whole bunch of resources to help you tell truth to power and thrive and/or to support those who dare to speak on your behalf.

Why We Must Love Whistleblowers At Least Enough To Support Them

Think the only people who suffer when whistleblowers are quashed or retaliated against are just the whistleblowers, their friends or families (if they have friends or family who still speak to them after all the retaliation some suffer)?

Think again.  Since caveman times, we’ve needed people to warn us about fraud and dangers in our food, water supply, and protective services.  Today, as we rely on more goods and services from people we will never meet, we need whistleblowers even more.

If we don’t stop routinely ignoring or putting down people who expose wrongdoing, we just won’t have safer streets.  Safer medical care.  Safer economy.  Safer everything.

Imagine how many people would still have their homes and jobs if early truth-tellers about the housing bubble, Enron wrongdoings and Bernie Madoff were heeded and honored by groups that were supposed to be watching out for us, like the SEC?

Truth-Telling is a Basic Spiritual Practice

Almost every Old Testament Prophet story reports how scary it is to heed that call of “You want me to go where?  And say what to that powerful tyrant who has the power to kill me or at least make my life miserable?”

In those stories are also the wisdom that we just can’t evade the call to speak out sometimes.  Even if, like Jonah, we try to run far, far away.

Speaking out is also part of our spiritual call to be there for each other, to get each others’ backs,  so to speak. As Pastor Martin Niemoller put it in his famous Anti-Nazi poem,  “…Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

An Overdue Celebration of Whistleblowers from the Government Accountability Project.

Last night the Government Accountability Project (GAP), Participant Media and the Paley Center for Media live-streamed a powerful program, “Anyone Can Whistle” featuring 8 whistleblowers.  Among them were Frank Serpico (the NYC cop who was left for dead when he dared expose police corruption), Daniel Ellsberg (whose disclosure of the Pentagon papers exposed deceit over how the government handled the Vietnam War), Kit Foshee (who alerted us to the use of ammonia in beef products which was supposedly going to get rid of salmonella), and Coleen Rowley (Time Magazine’s 2002 “Person of the Year” after exposing intelligence breakdowns before the 9/11 attacks).

To see the archived presentation, go to the GAP website. Then please check out the whole site. Actively support whistleblower protection legislation.

Needed: Training In Effective Truth-telling

Don Soeken has often said that a big problem is that while we are taught to tell the truth, we’re not taught how to do it — though we are taught to fear being called a tattletale. He’s done a great service by supporting whistleblowers in many ways and providing tips for effective whistleblowing.

Coming tomorrow, the integrity training I got from my dad’s whistleblowing experiences.  Coming next week, tips and ideas from a prominent attorney who helps companies flourish by making integrity and civility a touchstone of the corporate culture.  Please join us!

In the meantime, please add your comments below.  How do you blow a whistle on wrongdoing respectfully, in small situations or larger ones?  How do you avoid it?  What tips do you offer for how to support whistleblowers?

As always, many blessings,

Pat McHenry Sullivan

Now that we finally have cable and decent streaming capability on our computers, my husband and I have become faithful to the late night fake news shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. We’ve also maintained our loyalty to Bill Moyers on PBS, whose prophetic guests are not always amusing.

The big difference between prophetic comedians and the people we usually think of as prophets is that we’re more likely to listen when we get to laugh first.

When we invite comedians into our living rooms, we accept the truth that when we laugh at the craziness, illusions and pretenses of the powerful and celebrated, we might also be confronting our own truths. With Stewart and Colbert, we also meet authors and thought leaders that get lost in much of the mainstream’s media obsession with the latest shiny (tawdry?) thing or its dependence on press releases from the powerful.

Were it not for Stephen Colbert’s fake news show, I might never have heard about Leymah Gbowee, a perfect role model for how spirit in action can benefit the lives and economy of a huge community.

Gbowee was once just another war-weary Liberian single mother. Then she had a crazy dream that led her to organize the country’s “market women,” some of whom had originally helped run guns that fueled a war among various warlords and against ruthless and corrupt Liberian president Charles Taylor. Armed only with quiet courage and white tee-shirts, this Christian and Muslim group of market women grew so large that they eventually helped topple Taylor and banish him from Liberia.

Now Taylor is on trial in The Hague at a U.N.-backed court for his alleged war crimes against Sierra Leone, and Liberia’s new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa.  Liberia is in the process of rebuilding a country where years of war had left 1/3 of the people homeless. Now “market woman” is a term of honor, and a major job of the new president is to help market women build better lives

Even for stories about work with meaning and purpose, it always helps get the story out if it has a sexy angle.

Naturally, in interviewing Ms. Gbowee, comedian Colbert started with the sexy bits, and how one of Gbowee’s major strategies was to organize a sex strike.

Colbert: You shut down the playground for Liberian men, you might say. .. How did you get other women to join in on this?

Gbowee: Desperation. … I had no idea about that Greek play ["Lysistrata" by Aristophanes, first performed in 411 B.C.] … But we had just gotten to the point where we were really fed up and we thought our men folk were not really serious about ending the conflict … So we needed to find a way to get to them and we thought that was one of the best ways.

Colbert: How did you word it?

Gbowee: We just said “no sex.” No sex until the conflict ends. .. So, even if you were not a fighter, if you had a friend who was a fighter, you had to stand up to him as a man [and tell him] “put the guns down, no sex until the war ends.”

Put together the Colbert Report segment with Bill Moyers’ show on Gbowee and you’ve got a powerful role model for dealing with everything from gang warfare to economic and healthcare reform … or even reclaiming the soul of the media.

“Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” the award-winning film about Gbowee and others who created the market women movement, will be shown on PBS some time in 2010. In the meantime, here are some things you can do:

• Watch the Colbert and Moyers clips with Ms. Gbowee and catch her contagious spirit.
• Foster your spirit by praying for guidance on how you can best put it to work.
• Find a screening of the film or arrange one for your group.
• Have fun with friends proposing your own “sex strike” or other creative strategies to local, national or world problems.
• Look for groups in your own area, like Life Skills for Peace, which is impacting youth in gang-ridden areas of Richmond, CA.  Help those groups and/or create one of your own.

Remember Viktor Frankl’s words from yesterday’s post: if we were immortal, we put off following our calls to make the world a better place. But we are very mortal, and we are designed to care.

Many blessings as always, Pat McHenry Sullivan