Don’t Transport Today’s Standards Back to the Past
I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. You can “follow” me to never miss an article.
Republicans — especially Trump’s adherents — have fallen all over themselves in putting down E. Jean Carroll for taking so long to come forward with an “incident” that happened years ago, if it ever really did[i].
Thus, among the very worst, Ms. Carroll has been labelled “the crazy Trump rape lawsuit lady”. In addition, she’s been called a “liar, fraud, and a wack job”. If this weren’t horrible enough, she’s a “Deranged old hag”. At best, she’s nothing more than an “Obsessive Publicity Seeker” way past her prime. Thereby the term “old hag:.
In speaking about herself, Ms. Carroll says:
“’I was born in 1943. I am a member of the silent generation’,…‘Women like me were taught and trained to keep our chins up and not to complain.’ She didn’t scream in that department store dressing room, she said, because she ‘didn’t want to make a scene.’ She laughed when Mr. Trump attacked her because ‘laughing is a very good — I use the word ‘’weapon’’ — to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention.’ She went back to Bergman Goodman, repeatedly to prove a point. It was her favorite store and she was going to let him take that from her…”
In sum, she says that
“I couldn’t have done it back then…of coming forward sooner: ‘I didn’t have the guts’.” But now? “It was just time. It was time, she testified.”
If we weren’t so Appallingly Divided, hopefully we could better accept Ms. Carroll’s account of things. However, to do so, we’d have to give up the attitude that we can’t trust old people to give truthful reports of what actually happened. We’d also have to give up the false notion that things in the past should be held to the same standards of today. We’d have to accept the fact that because women today are strongly encouraged and thus much more likely to report sexual crimes against them cannot be transported back to the past.
Finally, if we weren’t so Politically Divided, we could more readily accept accounts that challenge our basic beliefs.
[i] Jessica Bennett, “The Audacity of E. Jean Carroll,” The New York Times, Sunday, February 4, 2024, P AR 5.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
