This is the season of high-school graduation ceremonies, celebrating the launching of unsuspecting youth upon an equally unsuspecting world and everyone professing to feel good about it.
They should feel good about it, I suppose, since if they don’t get their Grade 12, they’ll probably end up ditch-diggers or millionaire inventors of another time-wasting electronic application before their voices break.
I watched my granddaughter Abby graduate last week and was impressed by the confidence of those heading on to higher education and enviable careers with the aid of scholarships.
I was just as impressed by the apparent unconcern of those who planned to “travel” or take a year or two “off” before taking responsibility for their futures.
I was not impressed by listening for hours to adults talking about complete persons spreading their wings and retaining fond memories while setting goals and achieving them.
It was at the three-hour stage that I thought of whistle-blowing. Not as a means to end the ceremony, but as a symbol of the age into which these young souls will find themselves.
When the whistle-blowing movement was launched by Ralph Nader more than 40 years ago, it was hailed as a means of exposing corruption in government and business, a check on government waste and corporate greed.
Public exposure of wrongdoing, of rolling back rugs under which it was swept, became almost a civic duty. Those who generated exposure, who risked careers by doing so, came to be regarded almost as heroes.
Now I don’t know how many teenagers graduating from high school today have thought about this.
I don’t know if they’ve been taught to weigh things like loyalty against self-worth, but I suspect that in this culture of entitlements and human “rights,” they don’t feel a need to.
These masters of their fates might not be aware that life can be a struggle, that employment comes with conditions attached and that societies and communities are more than simply a collection of individuals.
Before whistle-blowing became respectable, I met a fair number in government and politics willing to breach loyalties by talking off the record to reporters. Sometimes what they had to say was useful.
All of them shared a perception that they had a finer sense of what was right or wrong than their superiors. They subscribed to what they thought was a greater loyalty to what they thought was the public interest — even though they might have been little more than troublemakers with particular axes to grind.
The extent of secrecy in government is an abomination. The redaction of pages of documents released under freedom-of-information laws is an insult to public intelligence.
Even with what little transparency these laws provide, some governments these days prefer to govern not with documentation but by a nod and a wink.
Effective whistle-blowing laws would enforce institutional integrity and the primacy of the public interest, extend into the private sector and provide access to the courts — none of which is achieved by the Public Servants Disclosure Act that became law in Canada in 2007.
I don’t think any whistle-blowing law can protect Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA technician who has revealed how the U.S. government is tracking the email and telephone trails left by citizens.
He seems, with his secretive movements, his disappearances and reappearances, to be as much in search of notoriety as the public good.
He can’t be a model for this season’s graduates because, apparently, he didn’t even finish high school. And he shouldn’t be a role model simply as someone who can’t “fit in.”
Fitting in is what adult life is all about and it will be hard, especially for young men who don’t care, apparently, if their pants fit or not.
They’ll face a balancing act, as fine as the one they need on their skateboards, between their freedom as individuals to do what they want and the restrictions imposed on them or that they have to accept to get what they need.
Even if they never have the urge to blow a whistle, they’ll have to conform. They were born free, but everywhere they’re under surveillance.
