Today’s top tweet actually comes from yesterday. I’ve been busy learning Linux (read here) so the news – or at least my commenting on it – has taken a temporary back seat.
But I’ve more or less figured out enough Linux to do the news with it. So here I go…
About today’s tweet…
When I won a scholarship to study in India I was a naive North American. I had a few misconceptions:
One… I thought Canada and the US were basically the same. Two… I thought large scale corruption only took place in seedy, faraway countries.
Image – wikimedia.org
So when in India, I was offended by its obvious, in-your-face corruption.
This was the mid-to-late 1980s and you couldn’t miss it. I’m not sure about today. The last time I visited India was around 1991.
To make a long story short… on returning to Canada and the Canadian academic system, I was happy. I even felt – at the beginning – that I had found a new ‘family.’ A group of honorable people dedicated to learning and knowledge in areas I was becoming increasingly interested in — in my case, Psychology and Religion.
World Map Index of perception of corruption 2010 (Image: Wikipedia)
A few years later, however, my new ‘family’ proved to be just as weird and dysfunctional as any biological family can be. And I realized that corruption is not just an Asian thing. These days I believe it’s everywhere. We just hide it better in the West.
So I usually laugh at global measures of corruption… corruption “indexes” and so on.
Can a broken yardstick accurately measure another broken yardstick?
No. Obviously not. Measures of corruption, themselves, are inherently biased. Possibly even corrupt, themselves. That’s why I welcome today’s top tweet. We need to realize this.
Corruption isn’t just a topic for disgruntled outsiders shafted by the system. It’s something that hurts us all. And the longer we turn a blind eye to corruption, the longer it will do its damage to real people, here and abroad.
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