| I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shunned. There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst. Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted. Should we allow abusers to hold power because there’s a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city? Outside of the court system, shouldn’t we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate? Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired? When the information doesn’t exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes? |
And I say all that as someone who saw the Surrogate Court system abused to steal away all of the lifetime wealth honestly earned by my mother.