“Together we have built a beautiful
dream; We have proved that integrity,
values, and courage can still triumph in a corrupt world.”
George Roche III,
Hillsdale College
by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
And from dreams we must wake to
consider the truth; From truth we must
glean the needed facts which make the future, as a reality, possible.
I met President Roche many times
when my daughter, Ayn, was a student at Hillsdale. I met Mr. Trowbridge and was inspired by the
message and will that kept this small mid-west college alive with the
philosophy of freedom. When I dropped
off my daughter, I was comforted by knowing that she was entering into an institution
that would enable her to explore the greatness of the world while it kept her
safe from the depredations that stalked so many other campuses in America. Hillsdale offered this and delivered.
But I have now reached a point of
discontinuity with the powers that plot the course of Hillsdale’s progress into
the future. And the issue is not George
Roche’s right to privacy regarding the death of his daughter-in-law.
George Roche has no
right to privacy. His son might claim
that right; but not he. And his son is
speaking out and seeking justice for a beloved wife.
What is private is so because it has
not become public. This is painfully
public. And in this we find played over
again, in a very different venue, the protestations of Bill Clinton during the
Monica Lewinsky Affair.
We must stop living in a world we
divide neatly into public ethics and private ethics. Because we live in only one world and the
untidy detritus washes up on the shores of that world, visible in the lives of
individuals damaged by sexual depredation, abuse, and all the kinds of theft,
fraud, and violence, that we consign to the veil of the private. Lives are shattered by private acts of
wrong doing in ways that are more lasting and costly to individuals at least as
often as they are by acts of public malfeasance and war. Acts of private depredation consign more women
to welfare than do public acts.
Bill Clinton had no right to privacy
that enabled him to live one ethical life privately and another publicly; Neither does George Roche III.
The freedom movement, a combination
of Conservatives, Libertarians, and other individualists, have in this crisis,
an opportunity to extend the vision of justice and sovereignty inherent in the
individual into a vision which emancipates the human spirit, making a new
understanding of the future not just possible, but immediate.
It is really very simple. We must stop circling the wagons when our own
fiefdoms are threatened. We must open
ourselves up for truth, thus creating clarity in understanding for ourselves
and revealing to others that no crisis is more immediate or important than
simple truth and the individual.
In truth, those damaged can find
healing. The victims of sexual abuse
know this in their bones. Without it
their lives cannot begin that process.
Should we offer those at Hillsdale, including George Roche III, our
support if the truth is told? Of
course. But first, the truth.
Lissa Roche left a child. He deserves to know the truth. And that must include all the truths that
these circumstances call into question.
He is owed answers. George Roche
IV, the maligned son of the dynamic and charismatic father, is also owed the
truth, as is the wife he discarded after many years of marriage. It is clear that depredations took place in the
lives of these people, and it was a very personal kind of wrong doing. George Roche III used his power, created in
the public realm, to control those vulnerable to him, in the private.
If we adopted a code of ethics that
asked from each of us the same level of honor that we expect in business we
would have a schematic for personal behavior that would make this kind of wrong
less common, but which, more importantly, would reduce the confusion when it is
uncovered. Such a formula, called
Benevolent Individualism, exists. These
are the tenets:
1. All human action to be
appropriate to creating a world of increasing creativity, production, and trust
must be based on exchanges between individuals which are made in the absence of
force, coercion and fraud.
2. The more powerful party
to any exchange is responsible for ensuring that the exchange is fair.
Lissa Roche was seduced by a
powerful man who committed her to secrecy, thus cutting her off from help,
beginning when she was still very young.
She was the victim of a sexual predator and it eventually killed her and devastated her family.
I wrote this in 1999 and found it today while I was looking through old files. It was true then and I stand by it today. MP-F
I wrote this in 1999 and found it today while I was looking through old files. It was true then and I stand by it today. MP-F
