# Don’t wait for perfect information, but don’t stop looking, either.

# Don’t wait for perfect information, but don’t stop looking, either. 30 years ago a bunch of people were trying to get Reagan to quit financing terrorists in Central America. This was the glory days of the Contras and other death squads, remember? Anyhow, one guy wanted to be helpful and he wrote all these position papers about the wars there. But he really didn’t like the way we did church meetings and rallies. We can’t tell people what to do, he said. We have to give them both sides of the issue and let them make up their own minds. He got very frustrated with our one-sided propaganda against terrorism.

He was making a couple judgments that I didn’t share. First, he was equating the accuracy of information from the likes of Ambassador Negroponte (much later Halliburton’s Man in Baghdad) with what the human rights groups were finding, at great risk to themselves. Second, he acted as if our constituencies relied on lefties to inform them, when in fact their channels were overwhelming dominated by Reagan’s operation. Third, he wanted to hold off on lobbying and other political action till everyone had a complete understanding of the situation, as if we can ever have a complete understanding. He was a researcher by trade, but didn’t really understand how to use information.

We cannot hold off political action until each of us has mastered every detail. In the fight over Central America policy, there was abundant evidence, accumulated by reliable, not to say heroic sources, over many years, that Reagan was helping rich people kill many many low income people. As we pushed for hearings and investigations, more of the details came out to buttress and improve our analysis. More importantly, we were able to put the squeeze on some of the flow of money and weapons to the death squads.

Nor can we expect to start off with the perfect approach to race and sex issues. Since race, gender and the like are political constructions --that is, the control freaks have given them a much bigger role than simple biology would dictate-- identity politics cannot be a fixed story. Our understanding has to evolve as our society does.

In retrospect, I think there’s a fourth reason not to treat lies as just someone else’s honest opinion. Those of us who cheered on the death squads back then didn’t do so because we’d seen the steamy photos Fidel sent the Sandinistas (Fidel climbing out of his bath; Fidel and the cigar), or the latest satellite images of "Soviet-style" soccer fields massed along the Texas border. Rather, we’d got the idea through years of training that people who live in palaces have feelings, just like you and me, whereas scrawny brown raggedy people are spiteful, jealous, not to say insane killers; the day after they tear down the palace gates in Managua they’ll pour into Orange County with nothing but you know what on their crazed minds; and killing a couple hundred thousand peasants is a small price to pay to save suburbia. So debating Raygun’s official arguments would have missed the real reasons we applauded mass murder. The official foreign policy lies were completely flimsy, and would have disintegrated like Don Rumsfeld’s sex appeal, had they not been embedded in much stronger underlying stories of racism, fear and contempt for hungry people. We need to address the big-picture lies as much as the operational details.


My friend was right on two counts: we do have to acknowledge the prevailing lies, the central ones, and we have to keep gathering information. We have to understand the lies people hear, acknowledge their power and help folks unpack them, rather than simply ask folks to ditch them on our say-so. That’s not the same as pretending to accept torture memos or "free" trade imposed by speculators as legitimate points of view.

Recall that one pillar of democratic movements is education through action: that is, we push on the institutions to see what they're made of, and to see how we can change them. Even as we take action politically, we also need to keep open the flow of information about our issues. We can highlight the gaps in our understanding and continue to troll for the data to fill them in. We also need to track the results of our efforts. We should build in continuous feedback about whatever we do, so that we are clear about our goals, plan ahead and change course if we need to.

Continual learning requires also that our positions correspond to the information available. We have no need to defend Fidel’s treatment of dissidents, for instance, when we challenge U.S. terrorism against Cuba, any more than we support Nazis’ policies when we defend their rights to free speech.

When in our conversations we start to speculate or make grand assumptions and pronouncements with little supporting evidence, it's time to add new information. We could compare one situation with something similar --say, middle-class entitlement programs like student loans and mortgage tax deductions, with programs for low income people like welfare and food stamps-- to offer a different way to look at an issue.

We could fill in the back story (e.g. past U.S. support for Saudi princes, the shah of Iran, and Saddam Hussein; the impact of U.S. wars and "free" trade on the flow of immigrants; past battles over free speech and economic responsibilities) to curb that sense of shocked surprise that so often leads us to shortsighted, self-righteous, self-defeating reactions. We like to simplify the choices we face; in fact, we have to. But we can't let the manipulators do it for us, either in defining the problem or the range of possible responses. We have to recontextualize the shrivelled, superficial, often distorted way the power players frame the issues. Our problems didn't come out of nowhere. Whatever they may be, they are not mere shadows of the eternal cosmic war of good and evil.

We can name the authors of the policies that underlie the political and economic challenges we face, whether it be that facts that it was the Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus that lobbied so hard during the Cold War to insert "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance; that the corporations through the IMF dictated the impoverishment of many Southen economies; or that specific Republicans and Democrats going back to Reagan systematically sabotaged our system of economic regulation, thereby inviting one financial disaster after another. Who spreads the stories about welfare moms, the Homasexshal Agenda, the conspiracy against Christmas, the vast power of labor unions, the insidious peril of single payer health care, in what political circumstances? So when I complain about immigrants, I can situate my reactions within the long tradition of rightist politicians and terrorists, and what my grandparents faced when they came to this continent. When we understand that our economic and political situations have been deliberately constructed (though they don't always turn out as planned), we won't take Halliburton's decisions as some natural, inevitable outcome. We'll have less excuse to blame Big Government, Jewish people, same-sex marriage or abortion clinics for the wars, economic convulsions and family struggles of this new century. We should be as specific as possible and name our sources, to strengthen our own credibility and encourage similar care when other people contribute information.

We can correct misinformation. Contrary to the talking heads, welfare does not cost more than war; government health care systems are far more effective than the profit-driven chaos in the U.S.A.; most immigrants have no legal path to citizenship (as of 2009); Walmart has not raised its Chinese workers to the middle class. And after years of painstaking research, we have discovered that yes, people with guns do kill people.

At the same time, bringing new information into a conversation must not be a tactic to silence other people. We invite everyone to contribute, and to ask each other questions. What we're looking for is information to resolve the questions at hand, not to convert our conversation partners. It's very unlikely that we or our partners will pay attention to information that does not answer our questions. Thomas et al add that many times additional information reinforces what's already been said, and we should point that out (p.56).

Adding information can be especially tough when it relates to how people are treating us personally, in a context of many overlapping discriminations. If they are trying to dismiss us, they'll try to dismiss our story, too. Bulkin cites a hard conversation Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz had with a hiring board that rejected her:

In this exchange, Kaye/Kantrowitz appears to have made some difficult decisions, the first of which was not to respond simple by labeling the ridicule as anti-Jewish. She chooses instead to engage, replying with information that might undercut stereotypes of Jews, and with statements highlighting the similarities between biased assumptions about Jews and biased assumptions about (Chicano) Catholics. She recognizes that, regardless of her individual actions, the women she is talking to might see her as typical of and responsible for the white lesbian community; she may be seen --and cannot help but operate-- as both oppressor and oppressed (Bulkin 190).


I juxtapose the practice of acting and learning with the standard operating procedure of the late, lamented Halliburton presidency: make stuff up to suit your aims, reject any new information, then do whatever you want. Let's start with Paul Wolfowitz, ex-Deputy Secretary of Defense, ex-head of the World Bank (he was fired for arranging a huge raise for his girlfriend). Wolfowitz complained to Congress that researchers in the intelligence agencies, when asked to make the case for attacking Iraq, were "unwilling to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand, which effectively precluded developing and testing alternative hypotheses about the actual foreign programs taking place" (Goldberg 2-10-03 p. 42). Well, no. They could test hypotheses by looking for verifiable information. And they did that. They sent U.N. inspectors scurrying all over Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction, based on satellite data and tips from Cheney's paid informants. The inspectors found zip.

But Halliburton confounded its enemies with this brilliant argument: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." I thought it was the peculiar lullaby of former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, but no, there's a chorus. Listen to George Tenet, former director of the CIA: "intelligence work is often not about evidence but about the absence of evidenceó (44). Check out Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense for Halliburton and Obama: "the fact that we don’t have reliable human intelligence that proves something conclusively is happening is no proof at all that nothing is happening" (47).

All very logical, in a strictly limited sense, though not something you could use to bake a pie. These masterminds of foreign policy, however, elevated and extended "absence of evidence" into a doctrine: if you don't know what's going on, you just make it up. They told each other, we have no evidence whatsoever that Iraq plans to attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons, or actually has any nuclear weapons at all, but we don't need it. We can't prove he doesn't have these weapons and intentions, so we're gonna start us a ten-year war. After so many years, so many hundreds of thousands maimed and murdered, so little evidence of threat, these warrior-sages still maintain they saved the U.S.

I have decided to learn this art of making decisions in the absence of evidence. I don't know if there's any beer left, so instead of opening the refrigerator, I'll just go out and buy some more. I didn't ask my boss if I could have the day off, so I can. I've never seen this kind of mushroom before, so I think I'll just pick me some and eat 'm. Whoa! Look at the colors! Man, this is great! You should try it!

I never met those people, so I'll kill them.