Stanford Medicine (the university’s medical school and hospital) got 5,000 doses of COVID19 vaccine. Not enough for everybody – nowhere is there enough for everybody yet – but it was a great start. Stanford’s in Santa Clara County, where cases are soaring.

On Tuesday, December 15^th, , they announced they’d be giving the first shots. Huzzah! They notified people who were slated to get the vaccine.

They had formed a committee which created an algorithm to distribute the vaccine in an “ethical and equitable” way.” But apparently not an intelligent one. More about algorithms later.

Maybe you heard. It went to hell. By Tuesday, the administration realized they had messed up. Their darling algorithm had left out most residents and fellows even though these are the doctors providing medical care up close and (cough cough) personal. To people frighteningly sick with COVID19. Out of 1,300 residents, Stanford Medicine had plans to vaccinate 7 in the first round. (What about nurses?)

Unfold THIS.

Oh well, that’s how it goes. Too late, right? They explained: the algorithm had given priority to older staff, because age increases vulnerability to COVID19. This included older staff who didn’t see patients, who were working from home. The algorithm had also been told to pick between staff who worked in more dangerous units and those who worked in units where there were fewer COVID19 cases. But since residents aren’t assigned to particular units, no priority for them! (What about nurses?)

The residents wrote an angry letter. Friday they held a protest that made national news. “HEALTHCARE HERO Support is ZERO” said one widely-reported sign. In the letter the residents also said it was important to consider early vaccination of nurses, therapists, janitors, and other support staff who may be in danger, and who also seemed to have been left out of the algorithm.

Apologies commenced.

A reply to the letter said “This should not have happened — we value you and the work you do so highly. We had been told that residents and fellows would be in the first wave. This should never have happened nor unfolded the way it did.” (We didn’t do anything! It just… unfolded!) Stanford said they would change the list. They said senior faculty would be asked if they’d give up their slots to staff actually working with COVID19 patients.

Measure twice and cut once, as the doctors say.

In a video, Dr. Lawrence Katznelson, Associate Dean of the Medical School, said “I feel awful that this happened…. It was no one’s malicious fault, but it was a bad outcome.”

And here’s a statement of apology, edited for space:

…We take complete responsibility and profusely apologize to all of you. We fully recognize we should have acted more swiftly to address the errors that resulted in an outcome we did not anticipate. We are truly sorry.

As you know, we formed a committee to ensure the vaccine’s equitable distribution. Though our intent was to ensure the development of an ethical process, we recognize that the plan had significant gaps. We also missed the opportunity to keep you more informed throughout this process.

We are working quickly to address the flaws in our plan and develop a revised version. ….we will provide continuous communication in an effort to engage our entire community in this process….

…We deeply value each and every member of our community and the outsized contributions you make to our mission every day – especially during this particularly challenging year.

We take complete responsibility for the errors in the execution of our vaccine distribution plan. Our intent was to develop an ethical and equitable process for distribution of the vaccine. We apologize to our entire community, including our residents, fellows, and other frontline care providers, who have performed heroically during our pandemic response. We are immediately revising our plan to better sequence the distribution of the vaccine.

We see they stopped talking about the algorithm. Now it’s a “plan.”

Is that apology good? They do say they’re sorry for the lousy (death-dealing) plan. They do apologize for not acting to fix it right away. They’re acting now.

But they don’t name what they did, or its impact. Significant gaps? Could mean anything. They don’t say these gaps, flaws, and errors were bound to harm those working the hardest to save COVID19 patients, those in the most danger.

They say they take complete responsibility, and they admit they should’ve kept people informed about the planning. But they also plead that their intentions were good! All they ever wanted was to be fair! They don’t talk about how things went wrong, how the algorithm produced such a rotten list.

Okay, algorithms. Impressive word, maybe intimidating, something to do with math?

Although algorithms can use complicated mathematics and/or computer coding, when you get down to it, an algorithm is just a set of rules for doing something. Used by a person or a computer. A recipe is an algorithm. “Women and children first” is an algorithm if you use it to load the lifeboats.

You could give a computer that algorithm and a list of passengers on an ocean liner – a database – and instruct it to spit out an order of people to board the lifeboats. (And if you didn’t think of the possibility, it’s going to say a month-old-baby can get on the lifeboat long before its father can – too bad if it doesn’t have a mother along and has to board alone. Good luck, baby!)

So Stanford Medicine’s committee constructed an algorithm that said, among other things, “give priority to older people.” It did not say “don’t give priority to dermatologists.” It did not say “if they’re working from home, they’re not a priority.” It did not say to give priority to young staff working extra ICU shifts to cover the caseload. We don’t know what else it said. We don’t know if members of the algorithm committee got listed.

(‘Give priority to vulnerable older people’ is a fine idea, and an early part of the vaccine rollout across the country. But notice that this vaccine batch was sent to Stanford Medicine. Not to the law school, not to the business school, not any of the other departments at Stanford that have vulnerable older faculty. It was sent to the place where sick people are being cared for. Hint hint.)

Hey! Significant gaps!

Initially, they blamed the algorithm. ‘We love you and your work, but the list of who gets vaccinated is AN ALGORITHM AND MUST BE HEEDED.’

Algorithms are assumed to be impartial. If you’re not on the list, it’s not because the algorithm is hostile, it’s BECAUSE SCIENCE.

Ahem. Garbage in, garbage out. Algorithms function by following rules, and if the rules for making a list are flawed, the list will be flawed.

Medical School Dean Dr. Lloyd Minor has just said “algorithm.”

They can be racist – if you tell an algorithm to pick job candidates who resemble successful past hires, and you never hired black people before… the algorithm will perpetuate that. Even if that’s not what you meant! At all! (Highly recommended, very readable, not responsible for our errors: Weapons of Math Destruction, by Cathy O’Neil.)

Anyway, if you create an algorithm, you should check the results it produces. Proofread it. Maybe tinker with it, until it MAKES SENSE. Not just revere it because algorithm is such a cool word.

The apology acknowledges that the process produced a flawed list, and the flaws weren’t noticed, and when they were, they were at first brushed off. But it doesn’t say they’ll look into what was wrong with the process.

We’ll make a new list! We’ll let you look at it! All fixed!

No vaccine for ducks

SorryWatch pays close attention to words. We pursue matters like whether someone said she ‘was sorry,’ or said she ‘regrets what happened.’ What does it mean if he says he ‘takes full responsibility’ but also says he was ‘taken out of context’? What’s the difference between ‘I’m sorry I insulted you’ and ‘I’m sorry if I insulted you’? Etc.

People mostly agree when we point out wiggly slimy blame-dodging words. But often those words need to be pointed out, because humans are rather brilliant at rephrasing things so the words aren’t as hard to say. And sometimes the reason the words aren’t as hard to say is that those words are… not true.

Dishonest word use can start long before the point of apology. Thanks to our slavish devotion to Harry Shearer’s Le Show, we learned of a badly-worded apology for sneakily-worded denials from the New Orleans Police Department. (This story has been extensively covered by The Lens.)

It came out when New Orleans Councilmember Jason Williams was working on a draft of an ordinance to keep surveillance technology under control. His chief of staff, Keith Lampkin, called the police superintendent to be sure there were no problems with the wording. One part of the ordinance was a ban on using facial recognition technology, but since the police department had repeatedly claimed they weren’t using facial recogntion, Lampkin assumed that part would not be a problem.

Um, no. Actually, that wording would cause problems, because the police department was using it. Said the superintendent.

You are? Wait, didn’t you say you weren’t? How did we get that impression?

Here’s the NOPD not using facial recognition technology. We’re pretty sure.

Folks got that impression because, for years, the NOPD has been answering questions about facial recognition by saying they don’t own facial recognition software, or by pointing to the fact the city has a Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) in charge of video surveillance, and RTCC policy forbids the use of facial recognition. But the RTCC is under Homeland Security, and isn’t part of the NOPD.

However, at a hearing in July, an RTCC administrator appeared to speak for more than the RTCC when he said “Of course the city doesn’t deploy any facial recognition technology in a law enforcement purpose. The city doesn’t have any of that technology available for our use.”

Also in that hearing Councilmember Helena Moreno asked the city’s Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Wisbey if the city used either facial recognition or characteristic tracking software. “We do not currently employ any technology that does that in 2020,” was Wisbey’s oddly-worded answer. (SorryWatch notes that odd wording often means a bad case of look-at-me-the-important-technocrat, but other times it means the person is lying.)

Earlier this very month, the ACLU of Louisiana made a public records request (PRR) for everything on the city’s “use of facial recognition technology.” The reply: “The Police Department does not use facial recognition software.” Request closed.

That seems clear, doesn’t it?

But, but, how could the Police Department be using it, if they don’t use it?

Well. It seems that the PD has “state and federal partners” who use it. Who grant them access to using it. What? Who? For how long? Which partners? The PD doesn’t feel like saying, though they did say The Lens could ask the FBI, if they wanted. (The FBI wasn’t in a mood to chat, either.)

So: ‘We don’t use it! It’s just that our friends let us use it!’

I’d know those eyes anywhere, but the algorithm wouldn’t.

This came from NOPD spokesperson Kenneth Jones, who also said “The term employ used in the [public records request] response might’ve referred to ownership of the tool itself, which we don’t. I apologize for any misunderstanding. …Again, the word ‘employ’ was used in the context of ownership. The consensus between the PRR and NOPD response is that the NOPD does not own Facial Recognition tools.”

So there’s the apology, and it’s SUCH A BAD ONE. It’s not really an apology at all. They ‘apologize for any misunderstanding’? Bullfoot. The term ’employ’ does mean ‘use.’ It does not mean ‘own.’ English speakers know this. The NOPD craved misunderstanding. They worked hard to be misunderstood. They’re only sorry they got caught.

They used facial recognition. They didn’t want people to know, because they might get stopped. So they lied. They were trying to lie by omission, but had to fall back on plain lying.

In case you don’t care if your every movement is surveilled and recorded by the government because you HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE (wow, boring life), it’s relevant that facial recognition doesn’t work very well. And the not-working is racist in its effects. It gets white people wrong, especially women and older people. It really gets Asian and black people wrong. And it’s the absolute pits at recognizing Native Americans. (Who developed this software anyway?)

You might think that’s cool, because you don’t want facial recognition picking you out of a crowd and adding your doings to whatever database. However, when we say ‘gets it wrong” that might mean they can’t find you, it might mean passport issues, or it might mean FALSE ARREST.

As Councilmember Jay Banks pointed out, facial recognition software, helped by shitty police work, pinpointed a Detroit man as the guy who had shoplifted some watches from a Shinola store five months earlier.

Robert Williams was working when he got a call saying the Detroit police wanted him to turn himself in. He thought it was a prank. Hung up. When he drove home, cops were waiting on his lawn. They cuffed him in front of his family, took him away, and kept him 30 hours. Two detectives showed him a blurry picture of a big black guy. Williams, a big black guy, pointed out that the picture was not of him. He held it next to his face so they could compare. “You think all black guys look alike?”

One detective said to the other, “I guess the computer got it wrong.” They still didn’t let him go. Eventually he was allowed to post $1,000 bail and stand outside in the rain until his wife could pick him up. The ACLU took his case, asking for an “absolute” dismissal, an apology, and the removal of Williams’s fingerprints from the police database. Eventually the county prosecutor agreed to the dismissal and the fingerprint removal. In a statement, the office criticized the use of facial recognition without other evidence, and said “This case should not have been issued… and for that we apologize. Thankfully, it was dismissed on our office’s own motion. This does not in any way make up for the hours that Mr. Williams spent in jail.”

Also not good. They shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back (“our office’s own motion”) in the middle of their apology

Maybe you never rob a Shinola. Maybe you never travel outside the country. Maybe you never request access to top-secret facilities. But if, say, you’ve ever gone to a Rite-Aid drug store… you may still have been subject to facial recognition spying.

If facial recognition technology worked perfectly, we wouldn’t want it tracking us. No, not even so they can show us precisely-targeted ads, NO. Interestingly, it turns out that face masks frustrate that software. Black masks are especially confusing. The higher the mask is pulled up over your nose, the more the algorithms cannot cope. Pandemic silver lining?

Back to words. It’s nice to know that the NOPD understands the importance of vocabulary, even if they somehow get it so wrong. How much nicer if they understood the meaning of honesty.

Simultaneously protecting self and others from virus transmission AND testing for power to smell blossoms.

Kate Corder is an artist whose work includes themes of eco-catastrophe, ecologies, land use, and wildlife. One arts project she organized in 2016 and 2017 was the planting of 800 young tree saplings in Palmer Park in Reading, Berkshire, UK. That’s a lot of baby trees. But not enough.

What a nice little library in Palmer Park. Wonder if they have any books about trees taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

Corder organized volunteers to plant the saplings, or “whips”. The whips were donated by the Woodland Trust, a charity devoted to protecting UK woodlands, and planting more. A lot more. The little trees were hawthorn, dogwood, wild cherry, silver birch, rowan, hazel, all English native species. Doesn’t that sound pretty?

Planting trees is vital to combating climate change. The UK government’s Climate Change Committee has said 1.5 billion trees need to be planted by 2050 so the UK can get to ‘net zero’. (Net zero carbon emissions means that carbon emissions are canceled out by absorbing the same amount from the atmosphere. Which trees are brilliant at.) Earlier this year, the Woodland Trust pointed out that the government had promised to plant 12,000 acres (5,000 hectares) of woodland in 2018, but in fact only planted 3,500 acres (1,420 hectares). The Trust responded by challenging a million people to plant trees this year, in a “Big Climate Fightback.”

Sandi Toksvig telling Noel Fielding something urgent – presumably about going back in time to plant trees and avert disaster.

As Sandi Toksvig, a Woodland Trust “ambassador” (and co-presenter on the Great British Bakeoff) says “the humble tree… eats carbon dioxide for breakfast and makes all of our lives better.”

More locally, in Reading, the Borough Council (RBC) issued a Climate Emergency Declaration, describing the urgency of the situation, steps already taken and steps to be taken in the future to achieve a carbon-neutral Reading by 2030.

In talking about carbon outputs, the declaration noted that “Reading is urban in nature.” Maybe that’s why their impressive list of recommendations for action did not mention trees. Planting them, or not cutting them down once they’d been planted.

Silver birch trees (Betula pendula) in Enfield, fixing carbon.
(Photo: Acabashi.)

Because in mid-November, it was discovered that a maintenance team had cut down the little trees, along with the brambles and nettles they grew among (which would shade and protect the saplings until they were taller). It was “routine clearance of undergrowth.”

Somehow the council had forgotten the 800 trees, the wildlife corridor that was supposed to be protected, and yeah, the arts project. Forgotten, or never told other borough departments. Maybe both.

When the news got out, people were upset. The volunteers, the artist, the Woodland Trust, and people doing their best to combat climate crisis.

The RBC apologized. A spokesperson said:

Unfortunately these saplings were cleared in a recent routine clearance of undergrowth by our maintenance team. Regrettably, the whips were untagged and not clearly visible amongst nettles and brambles when the area was being maintained. The council respects and values the work of volunteers and we apologise to the community volunteers involved in the planting of the saplings for this unfortunate occurrence. The council is committed to working with volunteer groups in planting trees in viable locations to increase canopy cover. To put the situation right, we are planning to replace the cleared saplings by planting a selection of larger trees in a suitable location within Palmer Park, which will have a far greater chance of reaching maturity, with a particular focus on trees that support wildlife and increase the diversity of species present in the park. Over the last decade we have planted over 1,895 new trees across the borough and we look forward to continuing to work with volunteer groups to further increase our tree numbers in the future.

Terrible apology.

That apology didn’t soothe Corder, the artist, who said “I think it is very rude not to contact the organiser of the project.”

Flowering brambles. Enemies of routine maintenance, friends to wildlife and to ambitious young trees.

Rowan (Sorbus mougeotii). Give them a chance.

It didn’t calm volunteer Steve Goodman, who said “It’s not just the trees, the whole area was an essential wildlife corridor that was supposed to be protected for three years. The volunteers spent an awful lot of time and money planting them and that has now all been undone. The trees would’ve been around five years old, times that by 800 and you’ve lost 4,000 tree years in one go. This has happened now, what we need to ensure is that the council make sure this sort of idiocy doesn’t happen again.”

Less idiocy? That would be good, but the apology doesn’t convince SorryWatch the RBC gets it.

The apology casts blame on the project because the young trees weren’t tagged (800 little tags – what could go amiss?), and because they were planted among brambles and nettles. In addition to making this a bad apology, it shows no comprehension of the protective cover the brambles and nettles offered, and no understanding of the nature of a wildlife corridor – wildlife love brambles and nettles. Undergrowth is where wildlife lives.

The blame is all laid on the project for not signposting the trees, for planting them among the dread brambles and nettles, for planting such little trees, and for planting them in a place that’s allegedly neither “suitable” nor “viable.” The RBC takes no responsibility for not keeping track of the project and for not telling the maintenance team about it.

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), all untidy.
(Photo: Lisa Jarvis.)

Their plans “[t]o put the situation right” are also worrying. They speak of putting “a selection” of larger trees and of increasing “canopy cover.”

Canopy cover? Was this ever supposed to be about shade? It sounds like they’re only interested in creating photogenic parkland.

Clearly there’s more than one agenda at work here. Before they make any more decisions on what’s suitable, they’d do well to re-read their own Climate Emergency Declaration. And then talk to some actual biologists. Maybe the ones at the Woodland Trust would talk to them.

Kurt Eichenwald was a college freshman. Liked Swarthmore, great roommates, fun. Mostly. Some weird worrisome health things – so he asked his parents if he could get checked out when he came home for Thanksgiving.

Kurt Eichenwald, 2009.
Photo: Larry D. Moore. CC BY-SA 3.0.

His father, a famed pediatrician, directed the family’s medical care. He despised doctors who weren’t academics, viewing them as incompetent money-grubbers. He arranged for his son to see a neurologist at the med school, a guy with a good reputation. Eichenwald says he had the bedside manner of a termite inspector.

Dr. Termite diagnosed epilepsy, told Eichenwald to keep it secret so as not to be shunned. Never say “epilepsy,” say “seizure disorder.” Forget law school, because law is stressful, and stress can trigger seizures. Also, better drop out of Swarthmore – too tough. Dr. Termite also put him on a low dose of the anticonvulsant Tegretol, later adding Depakene.

Eichenwald, horrified by his situation, followed Dr. Termite’s advice, except the part about dropping out. He was determined to stay at Swarthmore and graduate with his class. This wasn’t easy, given the increasing number of seizures he was having, but with help from his amazing roommates, he persisted.

His next neurologist was more upbeat, always ready to talk on the phone, hear about the seizures, and increase the drug dosages. He never suggested blood tests, and whenever Eichenwald described a problem – dizziness, nausea, bruising, drastic weight loss – Dr. Quitstressing always said he’d never heard of that as a side effect of the drugs. Probably stress! Soon Eichenwald was on 11 pills a day.

We’re leaving out the summer Eichenwald nearly died when his bone marrow shut down because the drugs had reached toxic levels. This caused Eichenwald’s mother to change the habits of a lifetime, defy her husband’s wrath, and talk Eichenwald into seeing a neurologist of last resort even though he worked at a for-profit hospital. This was Dr. Naarden (real name), whom Eichenwald says saved his life.

An eichenwald is an oak forest, like this one in Kerry.

Eichenwald returned to Swarthmore feeling optimistic. He had a good doctor. There was a plan. Meanwhile, everyone said it would be good to see the school psychologist to help deal with the emotional impact of having epilepsy.

That’s where things got crazy. This psychologist, Schemer McPlotface, soon told everyone that Eichenwald didn’t have epilepsy, he had a brain tumor. He told everyone except Eichenwald, that is – his parents, other staff, and Dean Janet Dickerson. Dickerson called Eichenwald’s parents to tell them to take their son and his BRAIN TUMOR home, because he was too sick to be at Swarthmore.

Eichenwald’s parents asked WHY THE HELL McPlotface said there was a brain tumor. McPlotface said he could tell by the way the kid talked. This ridiculous diagnosis was quickly dropped – after his parents mobilized testimony from Dr. Naarden – without Eichenwald ever being told about it.

Meanwhile Eichenwald, knowing nothing about this, was busy taking classes, producing the spring musical, and singing in a barbershop group he’d co-founded. Tra la la, right?

Swarthmore College, looking orderly. Functional.

McPlotface was undaunted. He told school officials that anyway, Eichenwald was too sick for school, that he wasn’t functioning well. He said Eichenwald was pretending to be in better shape than he really was. He told Eichenwald’s parents this, too.

Eichenwald was called into an official meeting. Dean Dickerson explained that he needed to leave school. “You’re not well,” she said. “You’re not functioning academically and you’re not functioning socially. You need to go home and get care so you can handle college.”

Eichenwald disagreed. It was too early in the semester for anyone to say he wasn’t functioning academically, he pointed out. There hadn’t been any graded assignments, papers, or tests.

“You’ve had midterms,” said the dean. No – his first one was next week. So why did she say he wasn’t functioning? “That’s just what I’ve heard.” She wouldn’t say from whom. He suggested she call his professors, and she called a couple, who said he was doing fine as far as they knew. Well, NEVER MIND THAT, he wasn’t functioning socially, either.

Eichenwald denied it. “I’m doing lots of things. I founded an a cappella group with my roommate, and we’ve already had a performance. I’m working with the Swarthmore Players Club. I’m already working on the spring musical I’m directing….”

The musical was going to be Pippin. Allegedly.

“That’s not true. You just think you are,” Dickerson said. “Kurt, you aren’t doing these things.” Frantically, he waved a tape of the a cappella group’s performance, but they didn’t have a tape player and they weren’t interested in his delusions.

They escorted him off campus.

At home, Eichenwald discovered that both Dr. Naarden and his parents had accepted the idea that he was delusional. “They told me you were going to try to fool me,” said his mother sadly. “I understand you were having some trouble with your thinking,” said Dr. Naarden. Naarden said they’d hold off on the treatment plan until they figured out “whether the Dilantin has been causing your cognitive probems at Swarthmore.”

His father accidentally mentioned the brain tumor incident, shocking Eichenwald. When he asked how long it had been between the brain tumor allegation and the not-functioning allegation, his mother said “…A few weeks.”

Eichenwald said, “Okay, so here’s reality…. They wanted me out. I don’t know why. Maybe they’re afraid of liability. They made up two stories. Everybody knew the first one was bogus but trusted the second one. So now my treatment is on hold even though all of you knew they lied once before.”

His parents got a friend to ask Swarthmore’s president to look into the case. At a meeting, which included Dean Dickerson, McPlotface announced that he had been studying Eichenwald’s EEG and it showed that he did not have epilepsy at all – it showed mental illness!

Swarthmore’s equal opportunity specialist was there. It was the first she’d heard of Eichenwald’s case. She knew about EEGs. She had epilepsy herself. She interrupted McPlotface. “[Schemer], as I’m sure you know, many people with epilepsy have normal EEGs. You can’t say the EEG shows epilepsy doesn’t exist,” she said. “Also, I have no idea how you’re saying the EEG proves Kurt is mentally ill. An EEG can’t show anything like that.” He mumbled. He changed the subject. Afterward, the equal opportunity specialist told the president, “If Kurt sues the school, he will win. And not only that—I’ll testify on his behalf.”

Josephine, who detects imminent seizures.

Dean Dickerson still didn’t want Eichenwald back. The Americans with Disabilities Act did not exist yet. But the school was clearly violating the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. The family got Health and Human Services interested. A law professor said she’d represent him free. The legal threats scared the school into re-admitting him. On condition he not make the story public.

Eichenwald returned to Swarthmore, having missed a semester due to this cruel nonsense. He graduated with academic distinction. Eichenwald went on to be a investigative reporter at the New York Times, and to write 5 books. (This story is taken from his gripping memoir, A Mind Unraveled.) He married and had children.

Years later, he got a call from a Swarthmore student fundraiser. As usual he said he would not donate. She asked why. “Did something happen to you?”

“What could they do now, take away my diploma?,” he thought. So he talked.

“Oh my God, I am so sorry,” said the student.

“Thank you, and I hate to say this, but that doesn’t mean much. The school never apologized. I succeeded in life when they could have destroyed me out of their fears or their stupidity about epilepsy. All of my accomplishments have been despite Swarthmore, not because of it, and until the school acknowledges that what they did was wrong, I want nothing to do with it.”

In a few days, Swarthmore’s vice president for development and alumni relations called. He arranged that he and the school’s current president would fly to Dallas, Eichenwald’s home base, for a face-to-face meeting. The president asked “What can we do to repair your relationship with Swarthmore?”

“I need an apology. I need someone to tell me, officially, that this never should have happened. And I want back the tuition that was stolen from my family.”

Soon a official letter of apology came from the president. Then the alumni relations v.p. invited him to give an address at Swarthmore about his work in journalism. They would pay an honorarium. The amount of the honorarium was exactly what Eichenwald’s family was owed for the lost semester.

“You guys are very, very smart,” laughed Eichenwald. He delivered the address, and contributed the honorarium – plus $20,000 – to Swarthmore.

He probably enjoyed hearing that a few years after he left Swarthmore, a group of students organized to force Schemer McPlotface out for “unprofessional and abusive practices.” Rather than have outside experts judge his conduct, McPlotface resigned.

Later, while writing A Mind Unraveled, Eichenwald spoke to Dean Dickerson, who had long since moved to Princeton, and later retired. “[S]he learned for the first time the full story of the events surrounding my dismissal from Swarthmore. …she reacted with shock.” She sent a letter of apology, which he found touching. “I forgive her and wish her only the best.”

Here’s that 2017 letter:

I have been thinking about you continuously since you wrote… I am incredibly pained and sorry to learn of your traumatic experiences at Swarthmore. Most of your testimony about your interactions with Dr. [McPlotface] and Dr. Warner was completely unknown to me, and that which I thought I knew has been put in a completely different context.

I was aware you had been diagnosed with epilepsy and that you were on medication that needed to be managed appropriately. At that time, my knowledge of epilepsy and the potential for seizures was relatively limited. I found it helpful to have a professional colleague in the administration who had epilepsy who could inform us laypersons about the condition. She coached us on how to respond when she had seizure activity, and she was an effective advocate for students who had epilepsy or related medical conditions. At the very least, as you say, she successfully challenged Dr. [McPlotface] in a meeting [about] you. But I know—now—that was not enough. That was not nearly enough.

The doctor had asserted that you were not managing your medications. I regret that on the night I was called in to deliver the decision to you that you would be required to withdraw until you were medically cleared to return, in accepting the recommendations of our health professionals, I contributed to the trauma that has greatly affected your life. At the time I thought I had no reason to question their judgment….

…I view you as a role model for how to carry on and have an extraordinary life while dealing with a chronic, potentially debilitating condition. As I stated in my last message, I am—perhaps undeservedly—very proud of you.

Kurt, I have tried to be forthright in my response. I’m very, very sorry, and you have my heartfelt apologies.

How good are these apologies? Sadly, we don’t have the text of the president’s official apology. Sounds like it was good, worth at least $20,000. Let’s look at Dean Dickerson’s “touching” apology. In its repeated deference to “health professionals,” it’s dreadfully believable. But Dickerson knew that McPlotface had diagnosed an imaginary brain tumor. She was there when he was exposed as saying Eichenwald’s EEG showed things that EEGs don’t show. To really be forthright, she should have addressed the school’s willingness to obey an obviously unreliable, not to say deranged, “health professional.” She should take responsibility for not looking at evidence about Eichenwald’s academic and social “functioning,” and for accepting hearsay from that megalomaniacal “health professional.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Not a Swarthmore alum.

Still, it meant a lot to Eichenwald. Often, apologies are so desperately needed that when they finally arrive, criticism is beside the point.

Eichenwald made his way through a frightening and dangerous medical condition, repeated medical malpractice, and gaslighting of the worst kind. It makes a lot of sense that he doesn’t want to pick holes in the apologies he’s finally gotten, which do acknowledge the main thing: This never should have happened.

Gavin Clarkson and his fiancée went to get a marriage license. This was in Washington DC, where she lives. The clerk at the Courts Marriage Bureau asked for Clarkson’s ID. He gave her his driver’s license. The clerk rejected it because it was from New Mexico.

Nope. She said he had to produce his passport. His ‘New Mexico passport.’ Because she thought New Mexico was another country, not one of these United States.

New Mexico and Arizona weren’t ALWAYS states. Maybe the DC Courts Marriage Bureau is stuck in 1911.

Clarkson pointed out her error. She was skeptical. She checked with a supervisor, who said yes, Clarkson needed a passport. “You know you are from flyover country when… they come back and say: ‘My supervisor says we cannot accept international driver’s licenses. Do you have a New Mexico passport?’” reported Clarkson. Meanwhile, “All the couples behind us waiting in line were laughing.”

Countries issue passports. Not states. The clerk was polite, complimenting Clarkson on his English. Yet Clarkson dug in his heels. He refused to produce an imaginary passport and he refused to leave. The clerk went back to check again. Someone finally gave her the okay to accept the driver’s license as ID. She apologized.

The DC bureau seems to have been acting out of ignorance, not meanness. Ignorance with a big bow of red tape on top.

Clarkson, who has been a New Mexico state politician, told the Las Cruces Sun News about what happened, probably because this happens so often to New Mexicans that New Mexico Magazine reports such stories under the head “One of Our 50 is Missing.” It’s as if people hear the word “Mexico” and turn their brains off. ‘Oh, duty-free shopping!’ they exclaim. ‘You can get antibiotics without a prescription there.’ ‘I was just there, in Cancún.’

Perhaps they were misled by this map of the United States in the Catalan language, maybe that’s what happened? Nou Mèxic sounds pretty far away. From the Districte de Columbia.

But also, geographic ignorance is appallingly widespread. Sumac once spoke with a rental car agent who wondered if they use dollars in Alaska.

The wording of the clerk’s apology wasn’t in the stories SorryWatch saw. But after Clarkson told the Sun News about what happened, Leah Gurowitz, the director of media and public relations for the D.C. Courts, emailed this apology:

We understand that a clerk in our Marriage Bureau made a mistake regarding New Mexico’s 106-year history as a state. We very much regret the error and the slight delay it caused a New Mexico resident in applying for a DC marriage license.

That’s feeble. It’s good they looked up the history of New Mexico’s statehood. But it wasn’t just one person who said Clarkson had to produce a passport – it was the clerk and the first supervisor. And the person apologizing isn’t the one who gets to say, ‘oh it was just a tiny little delay.’ We’d like them to say something like “We bought an atlas of the United States and we will use in the future. Rest easy, marriage-minded citizens of New Mexico, New Jersey, New Hampshire and New York!”

Wait. We’re spying on UTAH?

Clarkson suspects he would have had less hassle if he’d used his Choctaw Nation ID instead of his state license. Maybe. He and his fiancée got married the same day all this happened. It was his birthday. SorryWatch is glad the “slight delay” didn’t prevent these two events from being on the same day. Congratulations and best wishes! And don’t worry if you’re honeymooning in New Mexico—the water should be fine to drink.

(Thanks to Ron L., who put this story where SorryWatch could see it.)

Maybe you thought you’d escape political and social issues by turning to the latest issue of Bovine Medicine. Practical, science-based information about medical aspects of cow-calf operations, mastitis, job opportunities for bovine veterinarians – useful and soothing, no?

Not necessarily.

Common English words for one bovid designate sex because we focus on whether we can get milk from them. (English Longhorn.)

Sure, that kind of stuff is there. Also “Drivers of Direction,” an economic analysis of the recent AABP (American Association of Bovine Practitioners) study on factors that affect career decisions. Factors other than pay. In other words, why do people graduating from vet school decide to become – or not to become – doctors for cattle?

The pay for “food-animal practitioners” tends to be good, better than other areas of vet medicine. What else could there be besides money? Huh, what do the experts say?

Here’s a passage from “Drivers of Direction”:

German cows, mysteriously in an indoor setting.

“Potential… factors include the nature of the practice itself, as well as how the work is viewed. Male veterinarians might be more inclined to move toward male-dominated environments—a trend that could continue to reinforce the perception of a masculine world…. Female veterinarians might find it more interesting to work with small companion animals whereas male colleagues prefer to be outdoors among large animals.

“The choice might also be related to the location of patients. Companion animals are more concentrated in urban and suburban areas while large food animals are more concentrated in rural areas, and men tend to be more flexible than their female counterparts when it comes to relocating to the types of places where the demand for food-animal veterinary services is high.”

Female veterinarians might also find these suggestions ridiculous and insulting and oh yeah NOT BASED ON DATA.

SorryWatch was amused by comments on the Scary Mommy blog. “Hold your horses. Did we fall asleep and wake up in the 1950s?” It includes great photos from Sunrise Veterinary Service in Texas showing female vets dealing with large animals. On a tweet showing such a vet interacting with a male alpaca – outdoors! – Scary Mommy snarks a warning “Because it’s a good idea to piss off a woman who can castrate you.”

Actually the alpaca is adorable and not very big, but other photos feature quite large cattle and moose. One vet tweeted a photo of herself with a cow, captioned, “If I squint hard enough, she looks like just like a puppy, therefore making my job much more bearable.”

Neatsfoot oil. Used on your fine leather products. Made from bovine shins. Irrelevant whether those are boy shins or girl shins.

Before we get to the apology, a linguistic note. Writing about cattle, at least in English, makes it clear that all common words for individuals are gendered. A cow is not a male, a steer is not a female, and there’s no common word for just one that doesn’t tell you whether or not it gives milk. Hence “bovine.” Or “bovid.” Also, in some places, beast, cattle beast, critter, or beef critter. Sumac wants to revive the archaic word “neat” for just one cattle-type animal.

The AVMA posted this on their Facebook page:

To our veterinary colleagues:

The AVMA sincerely apologizes for a paragraph contained in… an analysis of the 2016 AABP-AVMA study of factors other than salary that impact career decisions. Instead of presenting an objective analysis, this paragraph played into and perpetuated antiquated male and female stereotypes. This paragraph was a deviation from the AVMA’s own diversity policy and, most importantly, doesn’t demonstrate the respect we have for all of our members.

Economic analysts want to be able to explain why they see the results they do. Explanations should be based on data. In this case, there was no data or analysis that would support a statement regarding gender preferences across the bovine segment of our profession. It’s the job of the AVMA’s Economics Division to collect data, do a careful analysis, and then present information in an objective fashion so that it serves the profession in finding solutions to challenging economic problems. This case represents a “fail” in that effort. The AVMA apologizes and has requested a retraction on the article.

Like a family, we are here to support you in all that you do. Unfortunately, as it also happens in families, we make mistakes. We know this was a significant one. We are deeply sorry.

Vietnamese cow, expectant.

Veterinarian Amber Domino Labelle (who’s worked as both a large animal and a small animal doc) brought this to our attention. She writes, “I think the apology was objectively good, and I appreciated the direct acknowledgment of their mistake.

“The last paragraph is really disappointing, because it feels like an emotional call to forgive this mistake because we are ‘family.’ We aren’t family. We are a professional organization. I don’t owe the AVMA the same type of relationship I owe my spouse or my sister. I expect them to relate to me as a professional. That type of emotional appeal feels fraught with gendered-stereotyping. Would a male-dominated organization ask its membership to forgive a mistake because they were family?”

‘Yah, I keep getting these scrapes on the back of my neck somehow. I think this field is jinxed.’

Labelle also knows some recent AVMA history that led to another apology. In 2016 they published a salary calculator for new graduates. Cool! You can see what you should expect to make, so you know what to ask for! If you identify as a woman, the salary calculator instructed you to automatically deduct $2,300 from your salary.

That’s cold.

The apology for that one read:

The AVMA sincerely apologizes for any misunderstandings regarding the gender wage gap resulting from the recent online release of its New Graduate Starting Salary Calculator. Although this calculator was debuted during the March 2016 Student AVMA Symposium to rave reviews, in retrospect we realize that the difference between its in-person debut and broader release via internet was context—and we failed to sufficiently provide that earlier.

‘Those scratches? I have no idea. Why don’t you prescribe supplemental food and see if they clear up?’

The inclusion of gender as a factor affecting starting salary is NOT an indication that it is acceptable for female veterinarians to be compensated less for the same work. In fact, the AVMA firmly believes in—and will continue to advocate for—equal pay for equal work. The reality is that gender was identified by analyzing data collected from senior veterinary students over the past 15 years as one factor that is statistically significant in predicting the starting salaries of new graduates….

You should be upset over the gender disparity in starting salaries, just as we at the AVMA are upset… Unfortunately, it’s a reality, and one we have reported on in the past, just never in calculator format. As a profession, we must find a way to better understand and address the gender wage gap. The AVMA actively encourages students who use this calculator to… utilize all the information gained to strategically advocate for themselves during salary negotiations. This is especially true for women. We hope that employers will… reflect on any unconscious biases impacting salary negotiations and hiring practices. As for the AVMA, we will continue to investigate why the gender wage gap exists so that actions may be taken to help all of us, as a profession, close it….

That’s a terrible apology. We were taken out of context! You misunderstood! We just report the facts, ma’am. They loved us in Iowa!

Indonesian cow tries to justify its opposition to vaccination.

When you discover an unfair reality like a gender- or race-based salary disparity, you do not tell people literally to enter it into their calculations of the salary they can expect. (Don’t feel less worthy, ladies – it’s just that you’re ladies. Hey, it’s the reality.) You tell people NOT to base their expectations on it. Also notice the gender binary here; non-binary people don’t even get consideration in this calculator.

By the way, why don’t more women go into bovine medicine? SorryWatch does not know. A female (equine) vet we talked to said of bovine practice, “It’s production medicine.” A.k.a. herd health. That is, the vet’s focus is not on individual neats – Elsie, Elmer, Bossie, or Ferdinand – but on the herd and the costs of production. Beholding a steer with an injured eye, the cheapest solution might be to stitch the eye closed, rather than spend time and money restoring vision to the eye.

Not everyone who becomes a vet because they love animals might be drawn to production medicine. Yet that possibility also invokes a stereotype – a ‘women are sweeter’ one. Labelle points to possible systemic factors. Are experienced male bovine practitioners less likely to mentor aspiring women? Do bovine medicine jobs offer less flexibility to women with young children who want to balance recovery from childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare? Are women discouraged from entering bovine medicine by sexual harassment in male-dominated agricultural settings?

Could these factors affect anyone’s career choices? We don’t have any data for that. But the authors of “Drivers of Direction” don’t seem to have data either.

Just silly sexist guesses.

We didn’t call for a vet. You can go now.

SorryWatch exists because good apologies are hard. When human beings are challenged on our behavior, we often react with defensiveness. We may obfuscate a bit. We may make excuses. And this is natural. No one wants to feel uncomfortable; it’s not fun to examine one’s decision-making and find it wanting. A true test of character is when someone works through those feelings of discomfort, chooses to listen, considers others’ reactions and responses, and then decides to apologize.

This is what the organizers of the March for Racial Justice did. We commend them.

Here’s what happened.

On August 13, in the wake of Neo-Nazi marches and murder in Charlottesville, the March for Racial Justice was announced. The march was originally slated for September 9, but due to a permitting issue at the Mall on Washington, was moved to September 30. This date is Yom Kippur, the holiest date in the Jewish calendar, a fast day, a day when most Jews are in synagogue.

Jewish activists immediately spoke out. How could the event be scheduled on the one day of the year Jews were least likely to be able to attend? The March for Racial Justice organizers issued a statement. It was not good.

The core leadership of the March for Racial Justice regrets the scheduling conflict of the September 30 date for the March for Racial Justice and the Yom Kippur holiday, the Day of Atonement. The decision to schedule the March for Racial Justice on September 30 was made in honor of the anniversary of 227 Black lives lost and 122 unjustly imprisoned during the Elaine Massacre of 1919, considered one of the largest mass lynchings in the history of the United States. The core leadership of the March for Racial Justice recognizes and celebrates the historical unity between African Americans and Americans of the Jewish faith. These two communities are natural partners, as each have a history of persecution and discrimination. This unity was exemplified by the friendship of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King who marched together from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. When asked why he joined Dr. King for the march, Rabbi Heschel replied, “when I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.” When we discussed the date of our March with Rabbi Hannah Spiro, she stated that this march might be a powerful opportunity for Jews to pray with their feet in between services on Yom Kippur afternoon. Rabbi Spiro pointed out that many members of Jewish faith will prefer to spend the day in silent reflection, and that the fast may not allow for many to come out – but that some Jews may find it powerful to know that this march is happening in parallel with their fast; in the spirit of Isaiah 58, which calls for a “fast that breaks every yoke and lets the oppressed go free.” Our hope as the core leadership for the March for Racial Justice is that we can emulate the spirit and bond between Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel for our country and the world to bear witness to our determination to come together in love and unity. We hope that the occurrence this year of Yom Kippur and the Elaine Massacre anniversary on the same date can be a another point of solidarity and the continuation of a long and powerful history.

Why is this not good? First, “regret” is not “apology.” The former concerns itself with how the speaker feels; the latter is concerned with how the listener feels. When you apologize, you own what you’ve done. When you regret, you’re simply throwing up your hands and saying “ah, well.” Mentioning the friendship of Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel is nice, but it still relegates Jews to sidekicks in another group’s story. (A status that African-Americans know all too well.) Jews have their own history with those claiming racial superiority. I have no wish to engage in arguments about whether Jews are white; I say that white Jews are white and non-white Jews are not white. REGARDLESS: What matters for the purpose of this discussion is that Nazis and Neo-Nazis have never considered Jews white. To them, Jews are a filthy race. “Jew will not replace us” is a pretty clear indication of other-dom.) There is no question that in the USA today, African-Americans are far more marginalized than Jews. But both groups are targeted by the Neo-Nazis because of race.

And in an event designed to show unity against hate, leaving out one of the prominent targets of hate was beyond hurtful.

Furthermore, the organizers put Rabbi Hannah Spiro in a terrible position. They didn’t state her affiliation because she was speaking as a private citizen — the rabbi of a synagogue in DC near the Mall — not as a march organizer or activist. Fellow Jews were distressed that she seemed to be encouraging them to skip synagogue on the holiest day of the year. But as she herself told the Jewish community on her Facebook page:

The organizers hurt her in her own community, by using only some of her words and using them in a deliberately misleading way.

BUT THEN. They made things right, or nearly so. Check out the full statement on the March for Racial Justice’s site. This is SorryWatch, though, so we’ll just focus on the apology:

Choosing this date, we now know, was a grave and hurtful oversight on our part. It was unintentional and we are sorry for this pain as well as for the time it has taken for us to respond. Our mistake highlights the need for our communities to form stronger relationships.

After the horrifying events of the past weekend in Charlottesville, and the remarks by the President suggesting that “both sides” are to blame, we understand more than ever the need for unity against those who hate us in our many identities.  We have learned from our Jewish friends that Yom Kippur is a day of making amends and of asking and receiving forgiveness. We hope that our sincere apology will be received with compassion, and that we will build a stronger relationship among all our communities as a result.

While we continue to move forward with plans for the main march in Washington, DC on the anniversary of the Elaine massacre, we are working on ways to include the Jewish community on Saturday 9/30 after sundown and/or on Sunday 10/1.

We will be seeking a permit for the sister march in New York City for the afternoon of Sunday, October 1 and will share that information as quickly as we can. Many other sister marches are now being planned for Sunday, October 1 as well and we will keep everyone informed as those additional marches and rallies as they develop.

Our goal is and has always been to bring those committed to racial justice together and we are doing all we can to honor that important goal. We will continue to seek the thoughts and advice of religious and community leaders as this movement grows, and we will face those moments where fellow citizens register their concerns honestly and realistically.  As we share a big world with many people, all with their own rights to their freedoms of speech, expression and religion, we will always do our utmost to consider all points of view.

We are marching in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters who are observing the holiest of days on the Jewish calendar. Holding fast to Jewish tradition is also an act of resistance, in the face of growing anti-Semitism. We recognize and lift up the intersection of anti-Semitism and racism perpetrated by white supremacists, whether they wave Confederate flags, don swastikas, beat and kill people on the streets in Charlottesville, deface Holocaust memorials, or threaten and harass members of our communities and our religious and community spaces. And we recognize the need for all of us to work together in the face of an administration that condones widespread oppression of all those most vulnerable among us.

This is a long-term struggle and our relationship to each other transcends one day and one march. As we learn from this planning mis-step, we are working with Jewish leaders to make racial justice resources and prayers available for Yom Kippur observances in Jewish communities as well. We hope that on that holy day, Jews in synagogues across our country will pray for racial justice – lifting up black and brown people, Jewish and non-Jewish – in hope for safety and wholeness. Spiritual sustenance is an essential part of this work for justice. We’re committed to working together with the Jewish community throughout the year and every year until true justice for all of us is won.

The March for Racial Justice
August 15, 2017

Why is this good?

It uses the word “sorry” and “apology” instead of “regret.” It names the thing the organizers did wrong. It explains, correctly and well, what Yom Kippur is, and draws a perfect parallel between the meaning of the holiday itself and the need for this statement. It attempts to make amends by adding a sister march on a different date that Jewish activists can participate in. It makes clear that real listening happened, and it pledges to continue listening in the future. It includes Jews in a recitation of those people under attack, and recognizes their role in the struggle for justice. It mentions working with Jewish leaders on resources and prayers adaptable for use in synagogue on Yom Kippur. And — a small thing, but one that is meaningful to me — it uses the phrase “lifting up black and brown people, Jewish and non-Jewish.” Black and brown Jews frequently see their religious identity erased, sadly, by both Jews and non-Jews. It is powerful to name and recognize them.

I have quibbles. I wish the apology began in the first paragraph and not the third. I wish the headline began with “An apology” rather than “A statement.” I wish there were a specific, public apology to Hannah Spiro. And I cannot help but doubt the statement “The organizers of the March for Racial Justice did not realize that September 30 was Yom Kippur.” Look, it’s written on every farshtunkiner American calendar. I would have preferred the statement, “The organizers of the March for Racial Justice did not realize how central Yom Kippur is to Judaism and why this date would likely prevent Jews from participating in the March.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the Executive Director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights (I am, full disclosure, a big fan of both the rabbi and the organization), who has put her body on the line for intersectional justice in the past, was pleased with the statement, so I am too. I’ll end with her wise words (though if you want more on Rambam and forgiveness, SorryWatch has you covered):

1. I have been blown away by the ways in which Dorcas DavisTigre Di Forlivo and the other organizers have modeled teshuvah in the past few days. This is an important lesson for all of us in the last few days before the month of Elul when the season of repentance starts. When I reached out to them, they were incredibly open to getting on the phone and zoom right away, to listening, to sharing honestly, and to working on a solution. I am also grateful as always to partners in the Jewish community, including Rebecca Ennen, April Aviva Baskin, and Scott Perlo who also separately reached out. This group and a few more did a lot of hard work, and spent a lot of late nights this week working on a resolution that may not be perfect, but that will enable Jewish communities to participate in this event in some way, even if not in the march itself. (Including–very importantly–moving the date of the New York City march to Sunday, Oct. 1)

2. We know that coalition work is hard. But in a time when Nazis march freely in the street, and white supremacists feel emboldened by this President to spew their hatred of Jews, people of color, immigrants, etc. (note: these are not necessarily separate categories of people!) without shame, it is more important than ever to work across lines of difference even–and especially–when it’s difficult, and when feelings are hurt.

3. Jewish friends: Rambam taught:

“אסור לאדם שיהיה אכזרי ולא יתפייס, אלא יהיה נוח לרצות וקשה לכעוס, ובשעה שמבקש ממנו החוטא למחול, מוחל בלבב שלם ובנפש חפצה; ואפילו הצר לו הרבה וחטא לו הרבה, לא ייקום וייטור”

It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and refuse to be appeased. Rather, a person should be easily pacified but difficult to anger. And when the one who has wronged him/her/them, asks for forgiveness, one should forgive this person with a whole heart, and with a willing spirit. Even if this person caused great pain and did a great wrong, one should not seek revenge or bear a grudge. (Hilchot Teshuva 2:10)

I know that some of you still want the date to be changed. I wish this were possible too. But given the difficulty of securing permits for the National Mall, it’s not. So let’s take Rambam’s advice and accept this apology “with a whole heart and with a willing spirit,” in the spirit in which it was offered.

So here are a few things we can do now:

A. Go to the March for Racial Justice page and say thank you. Tell them you accept the apology. Affirm your commitment to working together now and in the future.

B. Get involved. Go to the FB page or website and volunteer to work on one of the sister marches, in NYC or elsewhere. Or volunteer to help plan what happens in DC Saturday night or Sunday. (don’t write to me to ask how–just go directly to the page!–you’ll find what you need, and the partners you need.)

C. If you’ll be in shul on Yom Kippur–and especially if you’ll be leading services, incorporate into Yizkor the El Maleh Rachamim produced by T’ruah in memory of those killed in racist violence http://www.truah.org/…/el-maleh-rachamim-for-victims-of-ra…/

D. Reach out to partners locally. Make new friends. Talk to people who are not in your immediate community. Everything helps. As I said above, with Nazis and white nationalists carrying assault rifles through our streets, we need each other more than ever, and must be committed to tackling the inevitable missteps and hurt feelings that will happen along the way.

On Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally say “G’mar tov” to each other. It means “finish well.” Finish your fast well; finish the Hebrew year well. But g’mar tov also might apply to apologies. Even if we begin them poorly, we can always urge ourselves to finish well.

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On the streets of Tower Hamlets, a London borough, a five-year-old set up a lemonade stand. She charged 50 pence for a small glass, and a pound for a large one. That’s about 65 cents or a dollar-thirty. Her father, a professor at Cass Business School, proudly watched.

Tower Hamlets high-rises. Nefarious things can happen under cover of fog.

Many people attending a nearby festival bought lemonade. All was well for half an hour, when a group of four malcontents showed up. They were local council enforcement officers. They showed their seriousness by switching on a body cam. SorryWatch chooses to believe they were wearing jackboots, shiny ones. One read aloud a long legal statement. The essence of it was that she had sold lemonade without a trading permit, and would be fined £150. (About $195.)

We don’t know if it was before or after she burst into tears, asking “Have I done a bad thing?”, that one of the officers said she’d only need to pay £90 ($117ish) if she was quick about it.

The officers gave her a Fixed Penalty Notice and left, no doubt feeling they’d made the borough better by their decisive action. Why it took four of them has not been explained.

Merida (as in Brave). “This! for your red tape.”

Father and daughter left, the daughter sobbing all the way home. The father, Andre Spicer, reported “She was very upset and had to watch Brave a few times to calm down.”

He told her they could get a permit and sell lemonade another day. “No. It’s too scary.” (Plus, you have to be 17.)

Professor Spicer tweeted to the Tower Hamlets account, “Took 5 year old daughter to end of our road to run lemonade stand. Fined £180. She’s now sobbing, ‘I did a bad thing’. Thx”

They didn’t respond.

Spicer then wrote a column about it for The Telegraph.

That got the council’s attention. The next morning they tweeted an apology:

So, about the lemonade standard incident… we are very sorry that this has happened. (1/3)

We expect our enforcement officers to show common sense, and to use their powers sensibly. This clearly did not happen. (2/3)

The fine will be cancelled immediately and we have contacted Mr Spicer and his daughter to apologise. 3/3

Bad apology. Stupid passive-voice avoidance. They are sorry “that this has happened”? So is the 5-year-old. So is her father. Maybe, so are you. But it’s the council’s responsibility, not yours, so they need to step up and acknowledge it.

Italian day, 2007. Child on right suddenly wonders if she needs to produce a permit.

Some blame gets assigned in the next tweet – the unidentified enforcement officers are thrown under the bus. (Luckily, buses have four wheels, one for each officer.) It is correct that they didn’t show common sense.

The fine being cancelled is good. It’s good that they intend to apologize to the Spicers, though we don’t know whether that apology will be just as craven.

Instead of saying it was all the fault of the senseless enforcement officers, will they say what they’re doing to introduce common sense into their efforts?

Tower Hamlets is in the process of adding officers. To judge by their tweet-stream, they’re focused on drug use, specifically a “No laughing matter” campaign against nitrous oxide. Because they’re fed up with “…groups of people taking nitrous oxide in the streets and the noise nuisance and littering it causes.”

Was it the same senseless gang of officers that a little later threatened Isambard’s Cycles with a fine for the crime of putting a free bicycle pump on the sidewalk? They claimed the pump was obstructing foot/pram/wheelchair traffic. Yet as the owners bitterly noted, “if we get a licence from the council for it, then oddly it ceases to be an obstruction.”

This photo is from 1970, which explains the great prices.

Again, there seems to have been a little media kerfuffle. Whoops! That led to second thoughts and a peaceful resolution. Apparently the fine was waived, the council offered to “install a bollard that can double as a bicycle pump”, and a compromise was reached about where the pump would be located.

Sounds like petty officialdom running amok. And evasive higher-ups. A reassuring apology needs to address that.

(Thanks to Wendy G, Senior Tennis Correspondent, for alerting SorryWatch to this story, which she calls “ridiculous in the extreme, especially in the context of police cuts being blamed for various more significant problems.”)

Let’s examine two apologies for the exact same incident. One is terrible. One is excellent.

But first, let me suggest we look at some adorable babies, because we’re gonna need to if we’re gonna make it to the end of this post.

Ready? OK. Last month, Texas Birth Networks, a non-profit that works to improve infant and maternal health outcomes, hosted a convention with noted midwife Ina May Gaskin as keynote speaker. Gaskin co-founded a commune called The Farm in Tennessee in 1971, where she created one of the first birthing centers in the USA. She’s the author of the influential book Spiritual Midwifery, a spirited paean to natural childbirth, written in super-groovy hippie language, which I read in 2001 with a mixture of delight, awe, amusement and annoyance before the birth of my first child. (It contains sentences like “Rhythmically contract and relax the muscles around your coochie and your peephole about 50 times a day” and “Talk nice; it will keep your bottom loose so it can open up easier.”)

After her speech, Gaskin took questions. That’s where the meconium hit the fan.

Tasha Portley, a registered nurse, asked Gaskin about the negative effects on maternal and fetal health of persistent stress caused by racism. (You can hear the question, and Gaskin’s answer here, starting at around the 46-minute mark.)

In a rambling answer, Gaskin first acknowledges that she has little professional experience in this area, then forges ahead. “You couldn’t look at our numbers [on the Farm] and have anything useful to say about it [the effects of racism on maternal and fetal outcomes] because the number of African-American women was rather low,” she says. “Poverty — we had that one covered!” The audience chuckles appreciatively. Gaskin goes on, “Poor people, ironically, can do rather well as long as they grow what they eat, and they’re from certain farming traditions. This has been known for a long time, and it comes from many different countries, that if you do hard work, and this is also borne out in rural Alabama and Mississippi.” She talks about the negative effects of stress, and the fact that there are some poor people among whom maternal death is rare, as opposed to communities that “have to deal with scary stuff day by day, ok?” And adds, “I think poor nutrition is another factor. And you start piling up things that are risky, then they have a cumulative effect.”

Portley tries again, more pointedly, noting that in studies that correct for other risk factors and behaviors and leave race as the only differing factor, African-American women still have poorer outcomes. Gaskin blithely tells Portley, “That’s very true!” She notes that CDC epidemiologists have told her that the phenomenon “cuts across all socioeconomic levels when you’re looking at African-American women. But how big a factor is that in other countries? Again, that’s hard to tell with other countries because they don’t necessarily identify by race as we do here.” She then laments the lack of “really solid evidence” and seems to stumble into praising Margaret Smith (1906-2004), an African-American midwife who wrote a memoir called Listen to Me Good. “Unfortunately all her writing was lost in a house fire,” Gaskin says, “but I talked to two doctors who worked with her. She never had a maternal death. That shows it’s possible.” Gaskin guesses that peer networks and religion helped with Smith’s maternal outcomes, noting, “You had more people going to church during her time — that took some of the load off some of the people. Prayer, singing together, lowers stress.”

Gaskin resolutely refuses to acknowledge Portley’s point (about which there is little dispute): Health disparities between white and black people are significant and growing, even when researchers correct for other factors. Intentionally or not, Gaskin seems to be blaming black women for their poorer outcome: If they’d only grow their own food, work harder, have better peer networks, go to church (fyi, black women are actually the country’s most consistent churchgoers), their health would be better!

aw jeez, time for another cute baby

After Gaskin’s words hit social media, doula and reproductive health consultant Samantha Griffin pointed out that CDC stats indicate that Black women have three times the risk of death from pregnancy-related causes of their white counterparts. She says what Gaskin should have and could have said: “Though we know that disparities in access to health care and the stress of systemic racism play major roles in these disparities, there’s much we still don’t know about why Black women’s maternal outcomes are so poor. And blaming Black women for their own deaths and injuries cannot possibly be the answer.”

It’s also worth pointing out that though Gaskin is hailed as the “mother of modern midwifery,” this title diminishes the achievements of generations of Black midwives. Long before Gaskin came on the scene, these women did their work out of necessity; The overly medicalized, overly interventionist, morphine-and-Scopalamine-obsessed culture Gaskin fought hard against was for generations not an option for African-American mothers.

Two days after her speech, Gaskin apologized on Facebook. Poorly.

Issues with this apology: Passive voice (“has caused a great deal of hurt”), protestations of not being That Guy/boasting of one’s own awesomeness (“I have spent a great many years of my career shining the spotlight on the massive racial disparities in maternal care”), expressions of “this is not who I am” (if you said it, it is indeed who you are, at least to some degree), overtones of “some of my best friends are Black” (“I am grateful to the many Women of Color who have offered their support”), concluding with a statement that again avoids the first person singular (“it will not fall on deaf ears”).

oh hey, baby break

Meanwhile, Texas Birth Networks did a lot better.

This statement hits all the elements of a good apology: It apologizes personally as well as publicly (Texas Birth Network reached out to Portley before making a statement on social media); it takes responsibility (though the words came from Gaskin, TBN steps up and owns them); it acknowledges the impact of the hurtful act, of not acknowledging Portley’s valid points and not addressing them right then and there. And most importantly, TBN names what it will do to prevent this offense from recurring (something Gaskin does not do): Better team training with more education on anti-racism and inclusiveness education; educating the white membership (sadly, social media comments on the incident show just how far many white women have to go in acknowledging the flaws of an idolized figure in the birthing community and recognizing that Black women have been wronged); reaching out to the wider community — particularly mothers and caregivers of color — for input; naming and thanking the caregivers of color who called them out, and promising to heed their requests for an action plan.

A personal aside: I, Snarly, was grimly determined to have natural childbirth and chose a midwifery practice thinking I’d deliver on a trippindicular cloud of oxytocin and “rushes.” (In Spiritual Midwifery, Ina May calls contractions “rushes”; when the mother is open to them as opposed to whiny and pain-obsessed, rushes are infused with psychedelic, sexual, near-religious fervor.) I giggled a bit at Ina May’s language, but I wanted what she was having. Alas, the midwifery practice I chose did not provide the experience I craved. Many scary tests, many false alarms, and a week after my due date the midwives determined that I had dangerously low amniotic fluid and needed to be induced immediately. A mad rush to the hospital followed, along with labor-accelerating drugs and my clench-jawed refusal of painkillers and hours of agony with barely any progress. Ina May had written that if a laboring mother is “cooperative and selfless and brave, it makes there be more energy for everyone, including her baby who is getting born.” My bad attitude was screwing my baby over! My inability to beam beatifically at everyone was damaging everybody! “Giving somebody else some makes you and everyone else feel good,” Ina May wrote. “You don’t have your baby out yet to cuddle and hold; so giving the midwives and your husband some is giving your baby some.” I WAS A DEMON WHO WOULDN’T GIVE ANYBODY SOME AND WANTED TO KILL EVERYBODY! I yelled at my husband for playing Brian Eno in the delivery room in a stupid attempt to relax me. Brian Eno could suck it! Ina May said, “Don’t complain, it makes things worse. If you usually complain, practice not doing it during pregnancy. It will build character.” I LACKED CHARACTER! Finally, after hours of artificially created contractions that made me feel that my entire midsection was being suddenly compressed by a giant boa constrictor, feeling like a huge failure, I agreed (sobbing) to an epidural. I immediately went from three centimeters dilated to ten, and my baby — my NINE POUND, TEN OUNCE BABY — was born an hour later. The newborn diaper was so tiny on her, the pediatrician said she looked like she was wearing a bikini on the beach in St. Tropez.

the pediatrician also said my baby was the size of a Volkswagen

Ina May’s philosophy is pretty blame-y. If you don’t have natural childbirth, you’re a victim of the medical lobby, a wuss, a patsy, a woman unable to be “cooperative and selfless and brave.” It is unsurprising to me that she carried this blame-iness over to African-American women as a group, without giving sufficient attention to racism or nuance.

A final addendum: I DID have natural childbirth with my second kid (eight pounds, one ounce, holla), with a much less interventionist and more hippie-dippy and chill midwife. I actually had the trippy experience Spiritual Midwifery promised. Probably because I’d already given birth once, and because I was in a birthing center with a midwife I trusted instead of a scary hospital room with people talking over me, and because I felt in control, the birth was much less stressful for my baby and for me. And maybe Margaret Smith, back in the day, had such a huge success rate because her clients also felt in control. They were working with a fellow woman of color, someone who didn’t condescend, someone who really listened to them, someone who knew what she was doing but also made her clients her partners in their process. The credit Ina May gave to churchgoing and food-growing might also go to, y’know, not being subject to racism in childbirth. It’s a thought.

A family member heard a radio story from “The Takeaway,” with a phrase he knew would mean something to SorryWatch.

On the day of his release.

In Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton was freed from prison after 3 decades. He’d been convicted of two murders committed during restaurant robberies in 1985. He always said he was innocent.

The case was weak. He was punched in at work at the time of the murders. At a warehouse where the workers were locked in. But a witness to a third robbery, shown a bunch of photos, picked Hinton out. The police found Hinton’s mother’s gun at the house where he and his mother lived. They said bullets at the scene of the crime matched that gun. Hinton had an incompetent lawyer who thought he wasn’t allowed enough money to hire a decent ballistic expert to challenge the idea that the bullet matched the gun. So the lawyer hired a one-eyed guy who had trouble using a microscope, and the prosecution made his testimony – that the bullets couldn’t be shown to match – look ridiculous.

Hinton was convicted and sent to Death Row. He said he was innocent. Whatever. Don’t they all?

There he sat, year after year. His appeals were turned down. His mother died. Every night he prayed “Lord, deliver me from this place.”

The Equal Justice Initiative took his case in 1998. They hired 3 different experts to look at the bullets. They all said no one could tell if those bullets matched that gun. So the EJI asked the State of Alabama to take another look. They refused. They said they didn’t need to, since they had already locked up Hinton and they knew he was guilty.

Supreme Court, 2010. Hold your horses. What’s your hurry?

The EJI, with lawyer Bryan Stevenson, appealed to the Supreme Court. Which was in no hurry. Tra la la. In 2014, they said Alabama should give Hinton a new trial. A better trial. Like, a fair trial.

‘Okay, FINE, we’ll look at the bullets – huh. Apparently there’s no way to match them to the gun. Huh. And the ones from different robberies don’t match each other. Whatever. Let’s just drop it.’

The D.A. dismissed the charges. Hinton was released. After 28 years.

Since they only let you use a plastic spoon in prison, he had to learn to eat with a fork again. He’s happy to be able to go outside. To eat fish and hush puppies. To visit his mother’s grave.

Does he have complaints, this Godly man? He told Corey G. Johnson of the Marshall Project, “These crooked D.A.s and police officers and racist people had lied on me and convicted me of a horrible crime for something I didn’t do. They stole my 30s, they stole my 40s, they stole my 50s. I could not afford to give them my soul.”

He has noticed no one apologized. “I haven’t even had a black senator or anyone from the legislature apologize. Nobody. Nobody who worked with the state has said, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you.’ Nope. Nobody.” (In our view, they should apologize not for ‘what happened,’ but for what was done.)

“This is Alabama.”
State Supreme Court building

Asked if he’d be suing, Hinton said, “I haven’t talked about it, and Mr. Stevenson hasn’t talked about it. Believe it or not, I would feel relieved if they would just come clean and somebody would say, ‘Hey, we’re sorry.’ But you know, this is Alabama. I don’t think we should have to make them pay me, but if that’s what it takes and if that’s what Mr. Stevenson thinks we should do, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Another reporter asked if he wanted revenge. “’Revenge is mine’ said the Lord. One day, the true revenge will come to those that played a part in sentencing me to death. I do not hate these mens that did this to me. I once did. But you know, no one in the State of Alabama to this day, have come up to me and say ‘Mr. Hinton, I’m sorry.’ No governor, no legislator, I haven’t been given not one dime from the State of Alabama. And they took 30 years of my life. They haven’t even had the decency to apologize. But I can’t worry about how someone treat me. My mom told me, ‘You are responsible for how you treat others. You are not responsible for how they treat you.’

“And with that, I get up every morning and I try to smile. I try to bring joy to those that are sad. And not one time did I forgive those men because they asked me to. I forgave those men, not so they can sleep good at night, but so I can sleep good at night.”

Consider that while the State of Alabama entertained itself by prosecuting Hinton, grandstanding about his alleged guilt and their determination to punish him as severely as possible, and refusing to re-examine the evidence, the real murderer or murderers walked free. Prosecutors who are truly tough on crime would not waste time going after random black guys. Really tough prosecutors go after really guilty people, black or not.

SorryWatch is fascinated by Hinton’s wish for an apology. An apology can’t give him back 30 years. It can’t give him the chance to go to his mother’s funeral.

But he’s not the only person who’s suffered horribly who says ‘They didn’t even apologize.” Here are a few from SorryWatch files.

Rikers Island from a plane.

In New York, 17-year-old Kalief Browder was arrested for robbery and held on Rikers Island. He’d been vaguely fingered by a stranger as one of the guys who’d stolen his backpack weeks earlier. He hadn’t done it and he refused to plead guilty. His family couldn’t pay $10,000 bail. Court appearances produced nothing but threats to lock him up for 15 years if he didn’t confess. He turned 18 on Rikers. He turned 19 on Rikers. He turned 20 on Rikers – when one day, after 33 months, suddenly the government said the case was dismissed. He could go. “They just dismissed the case and they think it’s all right. No apology, no nothing.”

One Sunday afternoon Roger Roux was bicycling a few miles from home when he was hit and killed by a car under unclear circumstances. The driver didn’t stop. His grieving son said the mystery made things “even worse… just not having an apology from the person that did this. It’s very hard.”

In 2011, 30 people died in a Listeria outbreak, eventually traced to contaminated melons. In 2014, the farm owners pled guilty to charges. At that point, they apologized. One woman who’d watched her husband die of the Listeria infection said she was angry that they hadn’t apologized before. “What would it have taken for their lawyers to have written a letter? You know, maybe that would have helped at the beginning with the trauma that we were going through.”

M84 stun grenade. Not for use around children.

In Georgia one morning – 3 a.m. – in 2014 a 19-month-old was badly hurt when a SWAT team seeking a low-level drug dealer hurled a flashbang grenade through a window into the kid’s playpen, where he was sleeping. The SWAT team said they didn’t know a family with four kids lived there, apparently not having received advanced training that would have let them notice a minivan with four carseats parked in the driveway by the door. No dealer was there. The child spent a month in the hospital, some in a medical coma. His mother remarked, “They have not made a phone call, no card, no teddy bear, no balloon no nothing of anything of an apology to my family or my son.”

Earlier this year Jesse Bright, an Uber driver in North Carolina, was hassled by cops and sheriff’s deputies after he took a passenger to an address they said was a drug house. When he started recording the encounter, they told him it was illegal to record – new law! – and if he continued, they’d jail him. Bright, who’s also a lawyer, knew that was a lie. Eventually the cops let him go, but when Bright pursued the issue of the lie, the officer and the department stonewalled him. The Washington Post wrote, “Bright said he didn’t initially want to share his story to the media, but when [Sergeant] Becker refused to return his phone calls and the department never apologized, he decided to go public.”

Another story about false imprisonment from the SorryWatch vault quoted Frank O’Connell, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 27 years in prison. As reported in The New Yorker, he said, “I will accept twelve million with a public apology, or fourteen million with a private apology to me and my family, or eighteen million with no apology whatsoever.”

We’ve found that some people are skeptical about apologies. They say apologies are just words. They say people are forced to say words that don’t make any difference, to go through a demeaning ritual that doesn’t do any good. What’s the point?

Here’s the point. When people hurt other people, those who are harmed are also hurt by the injustice. Consider these people who’ve been gravely harmed – orphaned, widowed, or framed for a crime they didn’t commit. Their baby attacked. No apology can make scars go away. No apology can bring back a dead parent or spouse. No apology can bring back years of life in prison.

But people in those situations still want apologies. An apology acknowledges injustice. It says that society cares about unfairness. It says ‘That should not have happened to you.’

It’s a contrast to an uncaring, hit-and-run world, where no one bothers to acknowledge that bad things were done. It’s the opposite of ‘whatever.’

An apology says ‘You matter. What happens to you matters. It matters enough that we say so. Our pride and our convenience are not worth more than your life, your father’s life, your child’s life.’

If an apology cannot mend a tear in the fabric of the human world, it can put a patch on the tear.