The Ultimate Challenge to a Father’s Love

Many of us will do “the right thing” when it is easy or pleasurable for us. The real test is when the right thing challenges us or may hurt us. The “hurt” might be the loss of a relationship, the loss of a job, the loss of money. And therein lay the ethical dilemmas that face us on a regular basis. If ethical behavior was easy, we would have a very different world. If ethical behavior was easy, we wouldn’t need newsletters and blogs and trainings and continuing education requirements related to ethics. And if our country’s leaders thought that ethical behavior was easy, they wouldn’t have passed Sarbanes-Oxley and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in their attempts to motivate companies to behave ethically. They wouldn’t be fining financial institutions whose ethical behavior had challenged the very economic security of our country.

But few of us will encounter the ethical challenge faced by Alhaji Umaru Mutallab. Alhaji is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father. Umar is the son who boarded the Northwest airliner on Christmas Day with bombs strapped to his body. And as Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times commented, behind all of the fracas of questioning how Umar was able to get through security to board the plane, behind the questioning of our security systems, behind trying to figure out who to blame for the security failure, is a powerful story of fatherly sacrifice, of a father who made a very hard decision.

When Alhaji became worried about the potential danger of his son’s fervent, radical version of Islam, about his son’s newfound fundamentalist commitments, Alhaji went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria to warn the authorities. Can you imagine doing that? Turning in your own child? This father recognized and confessed a breakdown; his confession was in the service of a greater good. In his case, the breakdown might have been in the family or the community or the religious institution in which the son was raised. In other situations, breakdowns may occur in our assumptions, our schools, our companies or organizations. But the key is that we don’t always get it right. Even if we are trying to do it right, we may blow it. We are not perfect creatures – never will be. And some of us aren’t even trying.

But someone needs to keep in mind “the greater good,” the larger community that may be negatively affected by our imperfections or poor choices or outright evil. Someone needs to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and commit to making it right. Is it easy? No. Do we need to do it? Yes. If we don’t, people get hurt, our environment gets hurt, future generations get hurt. We can say all we like, “But everyone does it.” Or “I’m just one person – what I do doesn’t count.” Or “What one person does won’t make that much difference.” Or “I did the best I could.”

Even if these statements are true, even if our souls or hearts have become so calloused that we really believe the excuses, the reality is that if one person’s bad behavior touches three others, then that can multiply and escalate exponentially in a very short time. In particular, the message gets passed along that “This is the way we operate in our society,” and others believe it and emulate it.

Fortunately, the opposite is also true. The Pay It Forward foundation has a wonderful video clip on their website that shows the exponential impact of spreading good deeds or behaving with good character (payitforward.com). What would happen if we each decided to do what the young boy does in the movie? What would happen if we did a good deed for three people each day, and asked them to do the same? What if we resisted all temptations to do the wrong thing, knowing that its impact would spread just as exponentially. Does the picture of exponential spreading of harm or good motivate you in any way? It does me. Suddenly, I am not “an island” anymore. Suddenly, I am connected in meaningful ways to everything and everyone around me. And, suddenly, I have the great responsibility of paying close attention to even the smallest of my deeds, of not brushing anything off by considering it unimportant, of aiming for what’s optimal. Umar’s father made a sacrifice that is probably larger than any of us will ever have to make. Surely we can get on board to make the small ones.

Loving and Doing "The Good" (January 2009)

I applaud the efforts that have recently been cited in my local news to encourage public officials (and all of the rest of us) toward more ethical behavior. It is time for us to take the gloves off, to move beyond complacency, and to realize that unless all of us act on behalf of character and ethics, we all suffer. There is no way in our society to separate ourselves from the effects of other people's unethical behavior; we have seen this in the devastation caused to our neighbors and friends and non-profit organizations by the unethical behavior of securities and investment professionals, realtors and mortgage brokers, and Bernie Madoff. We see it regularly in crime statistics and in the 15% more we pay at the cash register as a result of theft.

However, we can no longer point to "the other guy" as the offender when we have done little to create change ourselves, to behave ethically, or to teach our children to be people of character. We have had a "doing the minimum" or "doing what we can get away with" attitude, rather than a "doing the optimal" attitude, for too long. Clearly laws and ethics codes and procedures are not enough. Enron, and many other companies that have hurt employees, consumers, and the environment, have had ethics codes and procedures. They have often adopted them to comply with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines so that they can avoid huge fines should they get into trouble.

Yet, research indicates that laws and efforts at ethical compliance do not motivate ethical behavior. Unless values are infused throughout organizations from the top down, formal ethics procedures and awareness of laws do little to change individual or organizational behavior for the better. It is understood that ethical behavior requires first that we "know the good," thus the need for laws and regulations, codes and procedures. But these fall short in creating ethical behavior --we also have to "love the good" and "do the good." Preachers can preach "the good." Lawyers can define "the bad," or what we shouldn't do. Many can define and promote ethical behavior. But let's get the mental health professionals - experts in behavior change - to work on helping people to "love the good" and "do the good." Or better yet, let's all work together, using all of our skills, talents, and energy to "create the good," to aim for what's optimal, so that our children can inherit a better society to live in than we are currently experiencing.