Something I Wrote That I'm Ashamed Of
I was wrong; why is it that politicians and intellectuals so rarely admit that and what does that say about our present culture?
Do enough writing and at some point you’re bound to put something to paper that you regret.
One case I haven’t forgotten came up through my friendship with the late New York City Parks and Recreation Commissioner Henry Stern. Those who knew Henry will agree that he was very accomplished but a true oddball. He was also hard not to like.
Henry Stern: A loveable New York character.
I got to know him after he left his post as the Parks Department honcho. That was when he set up a liberal advocacy group called New York Civic.
As we were friends and Henry knew that I was a good writer but often broke, he sometimes asked me to compose paid squibs for the organization. One of these argued against the Rockefeller Drug Laws. These were strictures passed under former New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller that called for long mandatory sentences for street-level drug dealing.
Stern offered me $500 to write a short critique of the laws. Shy of funds as I typically was, I unthinkingly accepted the assignment. Then I spent an afternoon at the library researching the subject.
That largely persuaded me that opposition to the laws was wrong. However, I didn’t want to annoy Henry, and the few extra bucks were useful. So I’m ashamed to say that I sat down and quickly knocked out the editorial copy. This regret is increased as the laws were soon overturned. I doubt that my writing had much influence in bringing that about. But I’m sure it had some.
I confess this with some shame.
The argument against the Rockefeller Drug Laws was that minor dealers were receiving exceedingly long prison sentences. The perception in the media was that this was for dealing pot. In fact, in 1977 the state had removed people arrested for selling marijuana from the list of those who were due these harsh punishments. Thus, all the cases that I could find involved people who had dealt hard drugs — typically heroin, although occasionally cocaine — and then refused to turn state’s evidence and identify their suppliers.
This was before you could easily research cases online, and it may be that I missed the instances in which the Rockefeller Laws had been misapplied. Yet so far as I could tell, the long sentences given to street-level dealers were almost always punishments for people who knowingly offered people drugs that they knew might ruin their buyers’ lives and with few exceptions the cases involved heroin.
The law called for fifteen-year minimum sentences. But the cases that I found were more typically eight and nine-year sentences, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving someone an eight-year sentence for selling a small amount of heroin or, nowadays, fentanyl. These are extremely addictive and dangerous drugs, and no one peddles them without some understanding of the consequences.
One reason why convicts receive time off from their sentences is by expressing contrition. I wish that writers took the obligation to do so more seriously. I can think of few instances in which an eminent journalist or editorial writer ever admitted error. Indeed, this failing seems to be evident across the whole length of the intelligentsia and the world of politics.
On Friday, I bumped into a writer I greatly admire: John Tierney. He mentioned that he had once spent a couple of days with population theorist Paul Ehrlich. His 1960s book The Population Bomb is widely regarded as one of the most spectacularly wrong yet influential works ever written. It’s false prediction that the world would soon face mass starvation caused by over-population was not only incorrect but fatuous.
It was written at a time when birth rates in the industrialized countries were already dropping and Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution was transforming agriculture in the Third World. But Ehrlich willfully ignored this. The book’s popularity helped provide the intellectual justification for China’s compulsory one-child policies and India’s forced sterilizations. Yet Tierney says that even decades later Ehrlich expressed no discomfiture, shame or regret for what he had written…
