America's Worst Idea
Dear Reader:
This is a rather old-school blog. You will not find anything flashy or eye-catching here. My attempt with this blog is to shed light on the issues of social and human justice that we all struggle with. I worked for the National Parks Service (NPS) for ten years and was completely invested in concept of the National Parks as "America's Best Idea," a concept so effectively promulgated by Ken Burn's beautiful documentary. After 9 years of faithful and outstanding service, I found myslef at odds with my vindictive and abusive supervisor. Naively believing that the NPS was indeed the honorable, moral, and sincere organization the Ken Burn's described, I attempted to first address the issues with supervisor to the superintendent of my park. When that failed, I brought my concerns to the attention of the regional NPS office.
Long story short-- I was forced out of the NPS by the combined might of my supervisor, superintendent, and the regional NPS office. NPS management is one of the most corrupt systems in the US federal government. I sincerely believe that the concept of National Parks is truly "America's Best Idea." Placing such national treasures in the hands of a predatory and abusive bureaucracy like NPS management is a really, really bad idea. Placing the an agency like the NPS in the position of stewards over sites of conscience and social justice is morally wrong and counter-productive. NPS management lacks the honor, dignity, and integrity to represent the highest ideals of American democracy. Placing critical historic sites of injustices in the hands of the NPS is in itself an injustice and is "America's Worst Idea."
Maybe we cannot change all the injustice in the world. I believe that we can begin a new age of accountability and transparency if we have the courage to bring light to the injustices that bureaucracies try to hide with levels of secrecy and "confidentiality." But we need to start somewhere. I say, let's start with the NPS. Let us speak about what has been forbidden. Would not it be something if we could transform this high-profile agency into a standard for honor and integrity?
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Victimized Twice 4 of 4
Victimized Twice:
Part 4 of 4: Healing and the Failure of the NPS at
Sites of Consciousness
At the 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage, more than 60 years later, that
conflict between Japanese American victims of the forced removal and illegal
incarceration who developed Stockholm syndrome symptoms, and those of the
Japanese American community who refused to buy into the government denigration
and fought for their human and civil rights would flare up into heated
arguments. I was shocked when I
realized the implications this argument.
This bias for the veterans and against the resisters and protestors was
still alive and well in the JACL, in the Japanese American community, AND in
the NPS interpretation of the Japanese American stories. In all the NPS interpretation
materials, the Japanese American World War II veterans and their exploits were
always given much more standing, type, and dialogue than the resisters and
protestors. Even here at the Tule
Lake Pilgrimage, being a protestor or a resister was still (in 2009) looked at as an embarrassment rather than as a
courageous person risking persecution to exercise the highest American ideal: the right to oppose unjust and unconstitutional
laws, policies, and policy makers.
Instead of being recognized as heroes of the story of the illegal
imprisonment in their own right, the resisters and protestors still carry the
60+ year stigma of being “disloyal” and “trouble makers.” It is not a coincidence that this is
the very same rhetoric that the American government and the WRA branded this
segment of the Japanese American population with back in the 1940s. The majority of the Japanese Americans
who were victimized by the injustices and illegalities of the forced removal
and false incarceration were also victimized by the Stockholm syndrome. These Stockholm syndrome victims
identified and sympathized with the racist rhetoric of their captors (the
American Government) and the cost of this capitulation was the “irrational”
judgment against themselves and their own best interests as outlined
above.
The first step in the path to healing and recovering from trauma and
victimization is to recognize the source of the trauma and victimization. Those members of the Japanese American community,
who were victimized by the Stockholm syndrome while the American Government held
them hostage in concentration camps, were literally twice-victimized. The denial of the human and citizen
rights for the Japanese Americans held hostage in the concentration camps
during World War II created a situation where these Stockholm syndrome victims
accepted the “lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.” By “identifying” with the captors and
abusers (the racist elements of the American Government) the victims (the
Stockholm syndrome victims in the concentration camps) believed their captors
would accept them. To heal from
this abuse and victimization, these Stockholm victims must first recognize that
they were victims of this type of abuse.
Part of this recognition is to re-frame the Tule Lake, Kibei, and dissident
stories into narratives that are as heroic as the stories of those who fought in
the 442nd and 100th Battalion for the Americans in World
War II. This could go a long way
to healing the long-standing schism within the Japanese American
community.
Do not look to the National Park Service (NPS) stewards of the
America’s Concentration Camps for leadership in this matter. The agency is to inflated with its own
agenda for power to ever acknowledge that its sister organization, the War
Relocation Authority (WRA) acted in the role of kidnappers and captors. For the National Park Service and
the American government the “model minority” paradigm perfectly suits the
reasoning they need to justify the injustices and mistreatment of a segment of
American citizens. Go to Manzanar
National Historic Site and you will see in the interpretive materials and hear
from the brainwashed NPS interpreters a “balanced” story about internment. The crux of this “balanced” story is
that Ralph Merritt and the other WRA employees were well-intentioned heroes and
kind overseers who made life in the camps pleasant. You will neither find or hear anything about the
intergenerational injury and damaged caused by an entire segment of American
citizens being kidnapped and held hostage by the American government and the
WRA overseers. To apply the model
of kidnappers and captors to the American Government and the WRA in the 1940’s
would require the NPS to examine its own dignity, honor, and motivations and
require this agency to reframe its mission for sites of conscience. This is something the good-ole-boy, authoritarian
NPS is incapable of doing.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Victimized Twice 3 of 4
Victimized Twice:
Part 3 of 4: Tule Lake; Stockholm Syndrome
Many of the workshops in the 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage were highly
emotional and very informative, not just about what had happened during the
forced removal and illegal incarceration nearly seventy years before, but as to
how these traumas were still affecting people, families, and communities today.
During one break-out session, I
sat and listened to several elderly Japanese Americans tell their stories. Suddenly two middle-aged Japanese
Americans were yelling at each other.
One of the gentlemen was a leader in the Japanese American Citizen
League (JACL) and the other was from a family whose members had been out-spoken
draft-resisters during the incarceration.
Yes, the Japanese American soldiers who served with valor during WWII
while their families were in concentration camps deserved lauding and recognition. And these soldiers’ actions provided
numerous examples of how and why Japanese American were “full-fledged”
American. But the point is, this
is America-- where people are innocent until proved guilty. In 1942, the federal government
declared all Japanese Americans guilty of being unworthy of American
citizenship with no other evidence than a racist distaste for the
Japanese. It took as much courage
to fight for the rights of yourself and your family in a concentration camp as
it did to fight in the battlefield.
There is nothing more American than the right to protest, dissent, and
practice civil disobedience when faced with institutionalized injustices.
Why did the JACL and other hyper-loyal elements of the Japanese
American community buy into the federal government racist bullshit? There is a
very disturbing undertone here that no one has ever had the courage to look
at. I suspect that the position
taken by the JACL and by many people who went through the American
concentration camp experience (and even for some of those watching the trauma
from outside) can only be describe as the result of Stockholm syndrome
victimization. The Stockholm syndrome
plays a key component of this narrative and deserves a closer look:
From Wikipedia-
Stockholm
syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages
express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors,
sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally
considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims,
who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.
The FBI Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims
show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.
Stockholm
syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily
require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that
develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats,
threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” One commonly used hypothesis to
explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It
suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a
victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself.
When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they no longer become
a threat.
Inferred in the definition above, but not clearly stated in the
concept is that the Stockholm syndrome produces a degree of self-hatred on the
part of the victim. This
self-hatred is very clear in some of the absurd stands the JACL took in the
1940’s (like suggesting Japanese Americans should be allowed to take the role
of suicide troops for the American military). This stance clearly shows an “identification” of the victims
(the Japanese Americans) with their “captors” (the racist-elements of the
American government). This “identification” reflects and reiterates position
the federal government posited at that time by describing Japanese Americans as
not quite qualified for American citizenship by nature of their ethnic origin. Let’s not mince words here or buy-into the
US government rhetoric.
One-hundred and ten thousand people of Japanese ancestry, both American
citizens and resident aliens were institutionally victimized, abused, and held
hostage by the US federal government during WWII. Nowhere was this crime more egregious than at Tule Lake.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Monday, August 19, 2013
Victimized Twice 2 of 4
Victimized Twice:
The
Stockholm Syndrome, Kibei, and the Model Minority in America’s Concentration
Camps
Part 2 of 4: American Citizen Rights; Kibei;
“No-win” Scenario
What about the second choice, the choice to exercise your right as
an American citizen to protest and resist illegal and unjust actions? In the early 1940’s, this option for
the Japanese Americans was inverted and used to create a “no-win” proposition. If a person of Japanese ancestry were
to question the illegal forced removal and incarceration predicated on the
preposterous grounds of ethnic origin, the act of raising this question became
irrefutable “proof” of disloyalty. Adding absurdity-to-absurdity, hyper-loyal elements of the
Japanese American community, including the JACL, would adopt and implement this
“no-win” strategy by mimicking the rhetoric of racism. These hyper-loyal elements insisted that the only way
to for Japanese Americans to prove loyalty would be to not oppose injustices being
heaped upon them and by passively complying with the insults and injustices of
incarceration.
The US government devised a plan to use the above construct that
would evolve into William Peterson’s framework for the “model minority.” This plan was to divide the people of
Japanese ancestry into two groups and pit them against each other. The “loyal” factions (the “model
minority”) would remain compliant and submissively in the concentration camps and
the “disloyal” elements (the resisters) would be ferreted-out (with the help of
FBI collaborators in the camps), discredited, and again be forcibly removed to,
and isolated at the “Tule Lake Segregation Center.” This was the strategy that Mike Masaoka and the JACL accepted and adopted. This
segregation methodology tore the Japanese American community asunder and
created factions that have remained un-reconciled to this day.
Tule Lake concentration camp still carries a stigma among the
Japanese Americans today. Many members
of the Japanese American community bought into the government propaganda, or
worse yet, they embraced the paradigms of loyal and disloyal. Many people in the
Japanese American community today still think in terms of the people in “Tule
Lake Segregation Center” (aka Concentration Camp) as trouble makers, disloyal,
and as an embarrassment to the quiet and compliant “model minority” image of
Japanese Americans. The reasons
for people being at Tule Lake were as varied as the people incarcerated there
themselves. As part of the
segregation process, the vocal elements within the Japanese American community had
been radicalized by the abuses of political power that had deprived them of
their civil and human rights. The
dreaded Kibei element (the American born, American citizens who received part
of their education in Japan) were feared and marginalized by both the US
Government and the hyper-loyal Japanese Americans. The surviving documentation
of Kibei meetings, however, illustrates that the Kibei were: 1) well-educated,
2) openly discussing American ideals and justice, and 3) outraged about the
violations of civil and human rights that they and their families were
experiencing at the hands of the very same government dedicated to human and
civil rights. In the best sense,
the Kibei were being upstanding examples of American ideals.
Sending children to be educated overseas, was in the 1930’s even
much more expensive than it is to day.
The Kibei represented the wealthier and better educated elements of the
Japanese American community. As
militaristic Japan and Nazi Germany of the 1930’s discovered, the best way to
control people and deprive them of their rights is to discredit, marginalize,
and imprison the intellectual community first so as to set an example of the
dangers of questioning the power structure. This was exactly what the US government did with the
Japanese communities on the West Coast and later in the concentration camps. Initially the US government marginalized
and criminalized the intellectual components of the people of Japanese Ancestry
by arresting all the Issei leaders on the West Coast immediately after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Later the
same government silenced and discredited the Kibei in the camps by blaming them
for all distention and conflict. The
US government was highly successful in this action because six decades later, “Kibei”
is still a dirty word within a significant portion of the Japanese American
community. Within the interviews archived at Manzanar National Historic Site,
the frequency in which all the troubles, problems, and issues within the
concentration camps were blamed on the Kibei element is very disturbing.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Victimized Twice 1 of 4
Victimized Twice:
The Stockholm
Syndrome, Kibei, and the Model Minority in America’s Concentration Camps
Part 1 of 4: Self-hatred; Model Minority; Proving
Loyalty
Soon after the United State entered World War II in 1941, all American citizens of Japanese ancestry
were classified as 4-C (aliens) for military service and disqualified from
service. This was a classic, egregious example of racial profiling. In 1943, the federal government
reversed this decision and ultimately began drafting young Japanese American
citizens from the concentration camps they and their families had been falsely
imprisoned in. What were the
choices for these Japanese American fighting-age men living in American
concentration camps in 1943? Two
simple choices coexisted: 1) go fight for the country that wronged you; or 2)
stand up for your rights as an American citizen, protest the injustice of the
illegal forced removal and incarceration, and resist military service until
justice was done. Which course of
action was the true “American” choice?
This simple question drove an enduring schism into the Japanese American
community. I would personally
witness this schism at the 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage, more than 60 years after
the decisions had been made.
The first choice, to willingly go fight for the American military to
prove your loyalty was the choice embraced by the hyper-loyal factions of the Japanese
American community including the Japanese American Citizen League (JACL). JACL president Mike Masaru Masaoka who preached safely from Salt Lake
City, an area removed and insulated from direct insult and injustice of forced
removal and illegal incarceration, vehemently promoted this course of action. Mike Masaoka advocated for the creation of Japanese American suicide troops who
would spearhead attacks for the (white) American army. Mike felt that this dedication to die
for America would, beyond any doubt, prove the loyalty of all Japanese
Americans. There are so many
elements wrong with this type of thinking, not the least of which is the
self-hatred and self-loathing inherent in the concept. This first option, to fight to prove
you were an American, tacitly acknowledged and concurred the racist judgment
against and illegal actions toward the Japanese Americans.
This first choice created the specter of the “model minority.” The term “model minority” was coined in
1966 by William Petersen in his essay called "Success Story: Japanese
American Style." The
down-side to this success is the requirement for a “model minority” group to remain
deaf, dumb, and blind to institutional injustices heaped upon them. The “model minority” paradigm required quiet
and obedient compliance of the minority with whatever is asked of them by the
racist elements of the people who govern them. The reward for the “model minority” is assimilation. The costs for Japanese Americans in adopting
the “model minority” paradigm is two-fold: 1) the acceptance that their ethnic
differences are not up to standards for inclusion in American society, and 2) a
festering injury of self-loathing.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Informal Interpretation Sites of Conscience 4
Informal
Interpretation at Sites of Conscience
Part 4 of 4: The National Park Service-- Falling Short of the Challenge
By including Sites of
Conscience into the National Park Service system, the NPS has created a mission
mandate for social integrity and social leadership. This mandate is implicit in the directives of the NPS
Director’s Orders, which define the key components of informal interpretation
for Site of Conscience as facilitating opportunities for visitors to make
emotional and intellectual connections with the site and in prescribing that
the interaction with visitors should be based on the visitor’s needs. This mandate places interpreters into
the intense emotional situations associated with Sites of Conscience on a daily
basis. These stressful emotional
environments have the same potential of affecting the health and welfare of
both visitors and staff as do the fumaroles and geysers of Yellowstone. Yet, to date, the NPS has no system in
place to monitor how these highly emotional interactions are affecting either
visitors or staff.* The Critical
Incident Debrief may provide a good model for assessing the emotional effects
and stresses on the staff at Sites of Conscience. Yet because these emotional stresses may be cumulative, it
would be important to have regularly scheduled debriefs (as with base-line
hearing testing for staff working in noisy environments) rather than wait for
the damage to manifest.
As interpreters at
Sites of Conscience, we are in uncharted territory. We have become the explorers of the social landscape created
by these sites. It is up to us to
define, refine, and clarify our mission.
It is up to us to find effective and sustainable ways for visitors to
make emotional and intellectual connections with the injustices represented by
our sites without putting coworkers and ourselves at emotional risk. It is up to us, through our informal
interpretation to initiate a process for the visitors that may lead to healing,
if they choose to do so.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
The
author originally wrote this in 2011 when he was still idealistic and naive
enough to believe that NPS had the honor, integrity, and dignity to operate
Sites of Conscience. From a 2013
perspective, the NPS most certainly does not posess any of these
attributes. Read the other
postings on this blog if you have need of more information on the criminal
dysfucntion of the NPS.
The EAP program and all leadership, team building, and employee training programs in the NPS exist so that NPS management can detract attention away from their own abusive and incompetent actions and to enable management to psychologically rape NPS employees. Stay tuned to the blog for in-depth details of this process.
Informal Interpretation Sites of Conscience 3
Informal
Interpretation at Sites of Conscience
Part 3 of 4: The Pitfalls of Belief System and Forgiveness
People attracted to
positions as interpreters at Sites of Conscience usually possess strong
personal convictions about justice and injustice in addition to a passion for
human rights. Specifically,
interpreters tend to have an emotional connection to the primary injustices
associated with the designation of the site. These personal beliefs can manifest as the third pitfall for
interpreters. The challenge for
informal interpretation at Sites of Conscience is for the interpreter not to
allow personal convictions and emotional needs to impair the visitors’ need to
make their own emotional and intellectual connections with the site.
Cultural norms and
paradigms change over time. Sites
of Conscience can function as a spearhead for change. Sites of Conscience elucidate injustices that were
historically justified, institutionalized, and/or concealed. It is crucial to
the mission of these sites to present the full range of impacts of these injustices
on the groups affected by the injustices.
It is also crucial to the mission of Site of Conscience to illuminate
the fallacies inherent in the enactment and rationalization of the injustice. Bringing injustices to light and
presenting the falsehoods of the reasoning that created the injustice are the
tools that lead to changing cultural paradigms and can help heal people and
nations. Strong convictions about
human rights can lead to demonizing the perpetrators of the injustice. Interpreters at Sites of Conscience
must find the balance between providing critique for the motivations and
rationalizations of injustices without criticizing and marginalizing the
perpetrators of the injustice.
Sites of Consciousness do not exist to punish people who perpetrated the
injustice. Interpreters at these
sites must strive to avoid the pitfall of judging the past and of criticizing
those people today who still find it difficult to accept that their culture is
changing and who may be personally experiencing the paroxysms associated with
shifting paradigms.
Forgiveness presents
the final pitfall for interpreters at Sites of Conscience. Although forgiveness may play a
prominent role in the process of healing, it is not a requisite requirement for
the process. The capacity of a
visitor to a Site of Conscience to forgive the systems, institutions, and
persons that perpetrated an injustice is predicated the unique, emotional and
psychological composition of the individual. In many cases, forgiveness may be antithetical to justice
and to holding persons, systems, and institutions accountable for their actions
and policies. As Prime Minister
Morgan Tsvangirai said in 2010, “Forgiveness cannot happen in a vacuum. There cannot be real forgiveness without
justice.” Indeed, many of the Sites of Conscience
would not exist today if victims of the injustice simply forgave the policies,
persons, and institutions that perpetrated the injustice. It was the demand for justice from
these victims that led to an acknowledgement of the injustice and started the
processes to bring social awareness to these injustices. For an interpreter at a Site of
Consciousness, it is important to remember that forgiveness is an individual
and personal choice.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Informal Interpretation Sites of Conscience 2
Informal
Interpretation at Sites of Conscience
Part 2 of 4: The Pitfalls of Empathy and Emotional Comfort
Misconstruing empathy
creates a pitfall for interpretation at a Site of Conscience. Empathy is not “understanding.” Telling an injured person who is
experiencing emotional pain that you “understand” the injury and their
emotional response to that injury can create distance from rather than connection to
the injured person. Telling a person who is injured that you “understand” their
injury (based on an assumed common or similar experience) is patronizing and
can result in antagonizing and marginalizing the injured party. The concept that empathy and
understanding are synonymous results from an erroneous belief that all humans
are essential the same and react to stimulus and situations in common
ways. Implicit in this erroneous
belief is the assumption that there is universal access to “understanding” the
complex mechanism of how a particular injury affects another individual. This assumption also implies that you
have complete knowledge of the other person’s life history and how the
psychological impact of that life affects their emotional responses.
As an interpreter at
a Site of Consciousness, empathy can be effectively described as the emotional
recognition that another person is experiencing pain. The appropriate intellectual component of empathy for an
interpreter at a Site of Consciousness is to recognize that visitors
experiencing trauma and pain may be cognitively impaired by that injury and not
responsive to rational and logical reasoning. The second pitfall of empathy involves exceeding the point
where the interpreter has such a strong empathetic reaction and identification
with the visitor’s pain and injury that the interpreter also becomes
cognitively impaired.
An interpreter at a
Site of Conscience is also a human being with unique emotional needs and
subject to emotional responses as a result of the injustice and injury
interpreted at the site as well as interactions with visitors. It is human nature that, when confronted
with sources of pain, especially recurrent sources of pain, people tend to
create mechanisms for coping with that pain. However useful these mechanisms may be for emotional
well-being, coping mechanisms used by interpreters at Sites of Conscience may
inadvertently be detrimental to the visitor’s experience and become the second
pitfall for the interpreter. If
visitors are attempting to express the pain and injury that has arisen as a
result of the intellectual and emotional connection to the site and the
interpreter manages his/her own level of emotional comfort (with the subject
matter and/or the visitors’ emotional response) by redirecting the interaction,
“changing the subject,” or “downplaying” the injury by comparing it to other
historical events, then the needs of the visitors to make their own emotional
and intellectual connections with the site may be impaired and, subsequently,
the mission for the site is compromised.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Informal Interpretation Sites of Conscience 1
Informal
Interpretation at Sites of Conscience
Part 1 of 4: The National Park Service Mandate
National Park Service
Director’s Orders
6. Personal and Non-Personal Services
6.1 Personal Services
Personal
services are those in which staffs... facilitate opportunities for emotional
and intellectual connections between the resources and the visitors.
By their nature,
Sites of Conscience are rife with emotion and create emotional
dichotomies. The National
Park Service (NPS) mandate (see above) for these sites is to provide a venue
where visitors can experience and confront these potentially volatile
emotions. Sites of
Conscience exist as recognition of a historical event wherein one group of
people inflicted an injustice on another group of people. Historically, the
perpetrators of the injustice created an institutionalized system of
rationalizations and intellectual exemptions to justify their actions and
defend their belief systems. The
victims of the injustice received and often continue to carry the emotional
injury and trauma as a result of that injustice. The designation of a Site of Conscience carries an implicit
recognition that: 1) an injury and trauma was created from the perpetrated act;
and 2) the perpetrated act was an injustice. This dual recognition usually represents a de facto judgment
against, and reversal of, the institutionalized belief system that created the
injustice. Too many visitors, this
reversal of institutional beliefs is a greater affront than the initial
injustice. Sites of Conscience are
sites of contention. The
diametrically opposed perspectives implicit in Sites of Conscience create
unique challenges for evaluating visitor’s needs and facilitating opportunities
to create NPS mandated emotional and intellectual connections to the site.
All visitors to Sites
of Conscience experience a degree of injury, whether that injury results from
the trauma of the injustice, empathy for the victims of the injustice, guilt
over perceived culpability in perpetrating the injustice, or the emotional
injury and trauma that results from questioning and accusing the motivations
and actions of an institutionalized belief system that the visitor may still be
part of. With a mandate to facilitate
an emotional connection with the site, it is critical for the staff at Sites of
Conscience to realize that the nature of this connection will most likely be an
injury. Director’s Order #6 Section 6.1.2 further clarifies the
role of informal interpretation:
“[a]n
informal visitor contact is an encounter between a visitor and an interpreter
in which the objectives are defined by the visitor’s needs.”
If the commonality of
the visitors to a Site of Conscience is an emotional injury, then the common
“need” of the visitor is for healing.
Healing emotional
injury and trauma requires a complex, cyclical process involving: 1) recognizing the emotional response;
2) acknowledging that the response is rooted in emotional injury and trauma; 3)
understanding the origins of that injury.
Sites of Conscience provide the venue and informal interpretation can
provide the facilitation for healing.
Most visitors to Sites of Conscience have already acknowledged that they
have an emotional response to the event.
It is, in fact, this emotional response that draws these visitors to the
site in the first place. The physical visit to the site establishes the
connection between emotional injury and cause. The interpretive materials and interactions at the site
provide the intellectual understanding of how and why the injury happened. The role of informal interpretation at
Sites of Conscience is to facilitate this process. A first visit a Site of Conscience may be emotionally
overwhelming for a visitor attempting to understand the source of their
injury. Subsequent visits continue
to provide an emotional response, each one slightly different and with new
understanding and awareness. Each
subsequent visit provides the visitor with the opportunity to touch and verify
that the injury was and continues to be real and to bring new awareness into
the source of the injury. This is
the cyclical nature of healing.
There are several
pitfalls for the interpreter at a Site of Conscience that may interfere with
visitors’ making the emotional and intellectual connections with the site that
they need to work through their individual processes of healing. These pitfalls include: empathy, level
of emotional comfort, personal belief systems, and forgiveness.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
Monday, August 5, 2013
A Cult of Abuse and Victimization Part 4 of 4
A
Cult of Abuse and Victimization;
The
Dysfunctional Inner Circle of the National Park Service
Part 4 of 4- Isolation and Domination- Inherent
Conditions of NPS Employment
The second step for abuse requires the predator
to isolate the victim. The very
nature of work in the remote locations of most NPS sites isolates employees
from friends, families, and support systems. Isolation is inherent in the job. Isolation, in and of its self, is not necessarily
abuse. The totalitarian and
authoritarian structure of the NPS, however, creates situation where if
managers and supervisors in remote National Park site have the least
inclination toward predatory behavior, they can and readily do take advantage
of the isolation to victimize their employees. In his book The Case of the Indian Trader describes
the potential risk of this NPS authoritarian structure in the isolation of NPS
sites: “the social environment is often rigidly stratified, and the agency is
able to exercise a level of control over the resident and even visiting
population not seen elsewhere in normal American society.” This lethal combination isolation and
authoritarian power can produce situations where employees may even be isolated
from their Constitutional rights by predatory supervisors and managers. Supporting this idea, Berkowitz offers
the following observation from The Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility (PEER) in 2002: “It’s apparent that the NPS needs to be reminded
again that its employees are American citizens with First Amendment rights.”
The final step of victimization requires the
predator to exercise control and domination over the isolated and defenseless
victim. It would be imprudent to
believe that the National Park Service was created to provide opportunities for
predatory managers and supervisors to victimize employees. It would be criminal, however, not to
accept that circumstances associated with working for the NPS have created a
cult of abuse that quickly overwhelmed all the positive aspirations of the
NPS. The overwhelming evidence
from employees and from internal
NPS documentation suggests the latter statement is true. Despite all the rhetoric and seductive
statements of the NPS mission, NPS management has de-evolved into one of the
most authoritarian and tyrannical agencies in the US government. The cult of predation that feeds this
system begins in the isolated parks where managers and supervisors have nearly
complete control over the lives of their employees. NPS management has hijacked the rights and avenues for
advocacy implicit in the boards, program, and departments outlined above. The explicit purpose for this coercion
of these programs is to strengthen the tyrannical authority and power that NPS
management holds over its employees.
Paul Berkowitz, in his book The Case of the Indian Trader,
corroborates this observation:
The unspoken social pressures and
psychological impacts of this type of environment where employees may literally
live next door to or across the street from their own supervisors, produce
workers that over time become extremely obedient to and dependent on their
employer for virtually every aspect of their lives.
This sounds exactly like the final requisite
stage that Leslie Morgan Steiner describes as being necessary for predation,
victimization, and domestic violence-- domination over the victim.
Again, I’m not suggesting that the NPS has
become a haven for domestic violence.
However, abuse is abuse; victimization is victimization. Rating levels of abuse and
victimization and drawing an arbitrary line where one type of abuse is
unacceptable (physical abuse) and another type of abuse is tolerated (emotional
and psychological abuse) only serves to empower a culture of predation and
abuse that judiciously avoids leaving physical bruises. Out of the ground of
circumstances required for work in the NPS, the obnoxious weeds of predation,
abuse, and victimization have grown and flourished. This is not surprising that
all the requisite elements for traditional models of predation and
victimization are present in the circumstances of NPS employment. What is surprising is that so many good
people have tolerated and even supported this dysfunctional and predatory
behavior within the NPS. To stand
idly by while predatory managers write their own performance standards and work
frenetically with other predator managers to create an insulate, abusive
culture shrouded in confidentiality and secret records is to deny accountably
for your own inaction. To accept
the current double standards for NPS managers’ ethical behavior is to provide
tacit approval for these predatory people to act out their personal perversions
of justice with impunity. It
is way past time to say “no” to the type emotional and psychological abuse that
NPS employees are regularly victimized by. It is time we recognize that not all injuries bleed and not
all scars are visible. It is time
for transparency and accountability in the NPS.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
A Cult of Abuse and Victimization Part 3 of 4
A
Cult of Abuse and Victimization;
The
Dysfunctional Inner Circle of the National Park Service (NPS)
Part 3 of 4- The NPS Rhetoric of Seduction
Every year, hundreds of idealistic people are
seduced into working for the NPS as a federal employee, a volunteer, or as an
interns because of the high-minded values of the NPS mission and by a personal
commitment for a working relationship that includes public service. After
joining the NPS workforce, these people are continually bombarded with infinite
variations of these seductive values cascading down through emails from the
President’s office, the Secretary of the Interior’s office, and the NPS
Director’s office. Each one of the
messages are designed to reiterate the NPS commitment to merit, equally
opportunity, mission, and public service. A large number of these emails inform NPS employees that they
are the single most important resource the NPS has for fulfilling its
mission. These same messages also
state the importance of NPS employees in participating in the management of the
NPS and promise employees that their perspectives and comments are an integral
part of NPS managerial decision-making.
In addition to the top-down emails, NPS employee must take numerous,
on-line trainings on the ethical standards expected for NPS employees and on
the right and duty of NPS employees to bring issues and problems to the
attention of NPS managers. Processes
for NPS accountability are touted as being available through such programs as
Equal Employment Opportunity, the Whistler-blower Program, the Merit Systems
Protection Board (MSPB), and the NPS Human Resources Division. If an NPS
employee is fortunate enough to obtain a career track position, all of these
values and advocacy tools will be reiterated in NPS Fundamentals Training and
additional training workshops such as Operational Leadership. These are indeed,
high-minded ideals and values.
They would not be seductive, however, if they were true.
These high-minded ideals and values are
categorically not true. The
reality of the values and ethics described above is that none of them are
actually available to victims of predatory manager and supervisor. The systems described above are a
one-way street the serves only NPS management. Paul Berkowitz, in his book The
Case of the Indian Trader, paints a picture of how the upper management of
the NPS is completely insulated from being held accountable to the mission of
the NPS, ethics, or the other high-minded ideals outlined above:
In his February 2007 testimony before
the House Natural Resources Committee, Inspector General Devaney once again
addressed the magnitude of ethics and integrity deficiencies permeating DOI
agencies like the NPS. Devaney cited “a culture that lacks accountability,”
observing that supervisors generally received lighter punishments than lower-ranking
employees and that senior executive service members were “remarkably immune to
any adverse action greater than a reprimand.”
Within the NPS it is well known that any
employee who files a grievance against a manager or supervisor will eventually
be terminated or forced to leave the NPS. The same goes for
whistle-blowing. The NPS has its
own Whistler-blower Program, Merit Systems Protection Board (MPSB), Human
Resources Division, and even its own Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) program. These programs are typically housed in
the same buildings as the regional NPS management offices. All of these programs work only to
maintain the rigid authoritarian stratification of the NPS and nearly always
find in favor of NPS management, not NPS employees. Many of the officers of these programs designed for NPS
accountability are former NPS managers themselves who still have connections
and friendships with NPS managers and supervisors. These accountability program officers often find themselves
in the ludicrous position of investigating accusations of hostility, abuse, and
ethics violations by their friends and former coworkers. The results of these investigations are
rarely unbiased and the victims of the abuse and hostility from these NPS predators
are further victimized by the favorable findings for the predator by the
accountability program officers.
These accountability programs serve as advocacy for NPS management, not
NPS employees. The same Human Resource officer who advises an employee about
filing a grievance against his supervisor will, in all likelihood, be
counseling that supervisor on how to defend herself from the very same
grievance. It is an incestuous circle that only tends to feed predation and
victimization. MSPB investigations
into favoritism and unprofessional behavior by managers and supervisors; Human
Resource grievance investigations; and even Equal Employment Opportunity
actions are often decided by accountability officers on the basis of secret and
(most often) fabricated “insider” records that managers and supervisors illegally
keep and share on their employees.
When one NPS informant requested to see the
documents (a right guaranteed by the grievance process) that were used to make
the decision on a grievance he filed with a NPS Human Resource officer against
a hostile and abusive manager, he was told by the Human Relations officer that
no documentation had been used in making the decision. This same Human Resources officer
informed the employee that all of the accusations and complaints against his
supervisor had been categorically dismissed and that she had been completely
exonerated. This institutional
exoneration provided the predatory supervisory with a “green light” to resume
her abuse and victimization with tacit impunity. Another NPS informant
described how the MSPB, without consulting with him, subsumed and dismissed an
EEO claim he had made against a NPS manager when the MPSB made a decision on
another, unrelated matter. NPS
management is also vehemently anti-union and will spend untold tax-payers’
dollars in obstructionist actions to prevent NPS employees from exercising
their rights to organize into unions and create a system of advocacy for their
rights as employees and citizens.
The above represents but a fraction of the
methodology and deceptions NPS management uses to assure that the high-minded
ideals, ethics, and values that were used to entice employees into a
relationship with the NPS are not actually available to the employees after NPS
managers have subsumed control of employee’s lives. Clearly, this seduction satisfies the conditions of
deception and lies that forms the first requisite step in creating a path to
predation, victimization, and abuse.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
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