Those searching for the Kim family were left with regrets, questions, and sorrow.
· Why had the search team rebuffed offers of help from the cell phone engineers?
· Had they relied too heavily on government search teams who didn’t know the area and its confusing forest roads?
· What if Rachor had not delayed his search but began in earnest on December 2 -- the same day James Kim had left for help?
The only satisfying response to such gnawing questions is to face this tragedy’s hard lessons. As one local man wrote: “We can regret ourselves to heck and gone, and it won’t change the past. Please, can’t we do something to get people to stop using that route in bad weather? Maybe this can be our way to make it up to the family that James’ legacy be that we do something to make sure no one else dies by making the mistake of taking that route in bad weather.”
Face the facts, review the mistakes -- then change. Repent.
Repentance means, literally, to “Re-Think.” With the benefit of the big picture – including key players and their communications, conflicts, misguided emotions, and missed clues that cried for attention – only then can we truly re-think, learn, and change.
For example, hospital physicians systematically use “M&M” meetings to review their clinical errors. M&M stands for “morbidity and mortality,” where unexpected deaths and complications are reviewed by one’s medical peers with the goal of hospital-wide improvement. Hospitals have developed a system for encouraging all staff to face their errors and correct them. There is no hiding behind one’s title or institutional clout – everyone’s contribution to error is acknowledged and analyzed. The goal is not punishment but improvement of care.
The M&M is a tried-and-true map for serious -- even deadly – mistakes.
The Emotions of Wrongdoing
When we realize we’ve done something wrong, we may feel one of two emotions: shame or guilt.
Shame and guilt may seem similar, but their dynamics are profoundly different.
Shame is always about power – the power of a community to reject the wrongdoer, to shun and ostracize. The power to restore the wrongdoer rests in the hands of the community or some authority figure. Someone with power decides whether the wrongdoer is now acceptable and ready for “re-admission.” And in today’s social media world, that power can reside with an online mob or some vapid influencer.
What used to be the simple shame of local gossip is now intensified by social media.
The columnist David Brooks has noted that our modern culture has lost its shared understanding of right and wrong and has substituted shame. [1] Now, from high school kids to celebrities, neighbors to distant strangers-- are all vulnerable to shaming on social media. A high school girl wears the same dress to a dance and a friend’s bar mitzvah? Her double-duty dress will be ridiculed on Instagram. A neighbor doesn’t pick up after his dog? He’ll be roasted on NextDoor’s news feed. A politician erupts at her staff during a hectic day? Her character is skewered in the press, her presidential ambitions dashed.
And there is no clear way out of shame’s wilderness. Shame’s trails are always un-blazed; they’re unpredictable and even unconscious. The shamed can internalize condemning voices, and continually accuse their own selves, with no escape from those inner voices. The shamers may feel unconsciously ashamed of something they’ve done in the past and project their shame onto others, indicting them for their own, secret crimes.
There’s a darkness in shame that keeps everyone lost in the wilderness – both the shamers and the shamed.
But guilt is different.
(To be continued June 30, Chapter Seven: Episode 29)
To Eight Trails readers: Does this post suggest a moment you’ve experienced and, perhaps, a photo you took? Share your reflections and photos with me by clicking “reply” to this emailed post. I would be delighted to include them in new posts — of course, crediting you!
[1] David Brooks, “The Shame Culture” (New York Times, March 15, 2016) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/opinion/the-shame-culture.html