A few years ago, somebody posted a copy of the "RMA Report" to the website Greensboro 101. I owned and operated the site, but I had set it up from the start to be guided by the advice of a seven person advisory board (myself included).
Several of the board members expressed immediate concern about the already twice-leaked "secret" report being on a web site with which they were involved. Their reasons ranged from having to maintain respect among the business community to not wanting scandal to interfere with their political ambitions. Frankly, I didn't think much of their reasons or their panicked response. So I ignored their calls to take the RMA report offline until we could meet to discuss it.
The board quickly did meet though and four of the seven board members resigned in protest. Joe Guarino and Patrick Eakes stayed on board, earning my eternal gratitude and respect, but I digress.
I was not sure how to respond to the embarrassing resignations. I used my lifelines and called Ed Cone and Jim Rosenberg. They both gave me some really good advice, some life-changing advice that I know has made me a better, more confident, more responsible person: Understand your mistakes, admit them and apologize to those you've offended.
That's what I did in response to the board member resignations. I came to understand, not just to be able to mouth the words, but to really understand, that I could not ask people to volunteer on an advisory board then poke them in the eye when they saw problems. No matter what I thought of the reasons for their concerns, it was just plain disrespectful to ignore them.
So I admitted why my actions were wrong and I apologized.
I am now able to have honest and spirited conversations with the board members who resigned. They entrust secrets to me in confidence and I to them. Respect has been restored. What happened has not been forgotten, but it is integrated into our histories as an innocuous, well-healed, unnoticeable scar instead of festering as an open sore oozing bloody puss all over the living room Berber. In short, we've moved forward--productively, respectfully, confidently forward. We are sources of motive power in each others' lives, when we choose, instead of closed doors.
Admitting mistakes and apologizing are not only cathartic, they are the only way to avoid getting bogged down in the mire. Candor and contrition get one out of the ditch and back on the freeway.
That is a lesson I wish Greensboro, in its collective consciousness--among its leaders and organizations, could come to understand: Candor is empowering.
It has become Greensboro's bane that we expend our energies on days, months, years and even decades avoiding admissions of even the smallest missteps rather than simply admitting them and moving on. We thus create a swamp of mistrust fed by a steady seepage of unresolved grievances.
Cries rise up for us to please move on, but absent the proper acknowledgment of our errors, those cries are no more appropriate than were I to have said to the board members that they should just get over it and move on. How could they? How can we? How can we continue to put faith and trust in our institutions and our leaders when we have no confidence that they can even recognize right from wrong?
I had started to offer a list of examples of local people and institutions who have failed to acknowledge missteps or betrayals of the truth, but I realized that a list off the top of my head would be at least a dozen and would overwhelm this post. Suffice it to say that our local media, city council members, civic leaders, city staff and the police chief have all made significant errors in judgment or representation of the facts that remain unacknowledged, much less corrected. The offenders already know. The public does too.
The cost of this tolerance of mendacity to Greensboro is great. We have lost time, time we spent pressing for even the most basic acknowledgment of the most evident of facts. We have lost the inspiration of potential heroes, people with great minds and abilities who, had they not lost credibility, might have gone on to show us the way to great things. We have lost the untold achievements that can only be reached by communities confident that they stand together on a basic foundation of candid sincerity.
That sincerity, that fidelity to our ideals is the most important thing we've lost--the thing that, once its absence is noticed, will soon have only the most jaded or hopeless wanting to live here. It would be different if we fashioned ourselves a Las Vegas, where bluffing is part of the game and deception in the service of a win is expected and admired. It would be different if we put ourselves forth as some cut-throat place where people are expected to always and only act in their self interest. But we are not that place; or we say we are not.
It is time for Greensboro to consider the North Carolina state motto as its own: "Esse Quam Videri:" "To be rather than to seem." If we are going to say we are a decent place, if we are going to ask people to believe that Greensboro is a place where we engage each other with genuine goodwill, we have to stop the practice of running away from our digressions, stop the increasingly common practice of obscuring the truth and obfuscating our mistakes. It makes us hypocrites in the face of what we say are our ideals.
If we cannot do that, if Greensboro cannot undergo the change that I personally did at the tutelage of Ed Cone and Jim Rosenberg, if we cannot come to understand that it is not a mark of weakness but actually a sign of confident capability to admit an error, if we cannot recognize that candor is a virtue, then let's drop the pretense. That would be better than to continue, over and over again, to cast ourselves as a nice place but prove ourselves the city of the lie.
We can call it growing up, coming to our senses, admitting our weaknesses -- whatever makes us feel better. But for God's sake let us, one way or another, stop spinning our wheels in a ditch of hypocrisy, it is going to make this an unbearable place to live.
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