We love a good redemption story
by Tom Sullivan
Casablanca, Groundhog Day, Meet John Doe, It's A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol. We love a good redemption story. Especially at this time of year.
So many of those stories, if not about personal redemption proper, are about cynics and misanthropes rediscovering a connection with the rest of humanity. With an economy out of whack, and with a justice system glaringly separate and unequal — one rigged for the rich and powerful, and another for the rest — there are probably enough Scrooges and Potters in this country to keep the Ghosts of Christmas busy 365-1/4 nights a year.
But with Ghosts of Christmas in short supply, Lynn Stuart Parramore of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project project believes bringing back a sense of shame in these Dickensian times might help hasten the revolu ... um, redemption:
History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices — the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.
What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.
Dickens himself might approve.