I am going to donate $5 to the Central Asia Institute every time I hear something negative about Greg Mortenson's work.
Not because I believe Mortenson is perfect, or that the allegations are totally unfounded. But because I believe the attempt to discredit a person doing humanitarian work of his scale is wrong-headed.
And the only way to fight ugly rhetoric designed merely to draw eyes to advertising is to throw money in the other direction. The haters need to see that their bad attitude not only doesn't work, it backfires. Big time.
Many people have been as dismayed as I have been over the recent criticisms of Greg Mortenson's work. For example, Nicholas Kristoff recently had a very good piece about this in the New York Times.
The media is abuzz about the "bombshell allegations" criticizing Mr. Mortenson. CNN, for one, says his central premise is "the way to fight terrorism is to build schools" and asks their on-staff national security analyst if he agrees with this.
Clearly, the attention whores at CNN have never even read the book on which they are reporting.
Mortenson has never personally made fighting terrorism the premise of his work. In fact, his publishers promoted the idea AGAINST HIS WISHES by putting the word "terrorism" in the title of the first edition of Three Cups of Tea in order to make it sell. Mortenson so disliked the presumptuousness of that claim that he made a deal with them that the words "fight terrorism" be excluded from the title of future publication runs if the initial work sold well. Subsequent editions of the book omitted the wording.
So Mortenson should never be held accountable for the concept of fighting terrorism by building schools. He wanted to build schools to help people; it's as simple as that.
Another piece of so-called damning evidence against Mortenson is that some sources claim that the Taliban was not in Waziristan during the time Mortenson was kidnapped by them. Presumably this claim would be based on something more substantial than CNN's own investigations, right?
Yet no source for the claim is given. Could it be from an authorized US government agency? Perhaps one so well-informed of the Taliban's activities back in the 1990s that they were able to head off the 9/11 attacks? Maybe it was from the same folks who have put countless good-guys-who-turned-out-to-be-bad-guys in power all over the planet. Or the people who trusted Hamid Karzai, hmmm? Those sources? Great. So either the claim was pulled out of the air by CNN staff (as it appears), or it is attributable to sources whose "intelligence" cannot be trusted. No matter, because due to some unfathomable lapse of journalistic professionalism on the part of CNN, we will never know.
So I make just a couple points, and there are countless others, on both sides, to be made.
The reality is that nothing is perfect. Nothing. And so Mortenson's accounting, both of story and money, is probably imperfect too. As an active member of a non-profit with equally noble ideals, I can tell you with absolute certainty that personally transformative stories are never purely told, and that organizational accounting is anything but organized. So what. The over-arching result is what matters, and that over-arching result in Mr. Mortenson's case is pure and good. Nobody questions that.
The bigger question is, why do this? What does Jon Krakour have to gain from attacking Mortenson? What is he fixing, making better, or saving us from? Has Mortenson's work harmed some one somehow along the way? Has some one's life savings (besides his own) been squandered on Mortenson's dream? Have real crimes been committed?
Or is there just a need to create another salacious media event?
My cynical nature tells me the latter explanation is true, and we are seeing, yet again, the national psyche being hijacked by an unreliable media in yet another new level of low.
This is, yet again, national mindset manipulation by a cynical media punch drunk on the effectiveness of the "everything you thought you could rely on is wrong" approach to reporting. Another shameless effort to get eyes for advertising, instead of informing, enlightening or even moving the cosmic dial one iota toward useful. It's a mere C+ homework assignment in the unclassy class of Media Terrorism 101, the core component of a crass curriculum required for a degree in Nancy Grace-style "journalism".
But my optimism wants to fight back. I'm with Kristoff when he says: "I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt to a man who has risked his life on behalf of some of the world's most voiceless people. . . . even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children's lives than you or I ever will."
And so I can think of no other way to fight back against the real problem -- media terrorism -- than to send money to whatever good and decent cause they are currently abusing for their own selfish ends.
Let's all do it.
Send Greg Mortenson's Central Asia Institute a dollar or a dozen dollars, whatever you can. Right now. Let's let the media, those childish "look at me, look at me, look at me" money-chasers know there are consequences when they act up.
Then let's see them report on that.
Updated by Nancy Meyer at Thu Apr 21, 2011 at 02:07 PM CDT
I should have pointed out more clearly that as far as I'm concerned, Mortenson can have financial irregularities out the yin-yang. I work Jan-April as a tax preparer, and I can say with absolute certainty that accounting work is an inexact science.
I also have worked on the books for more than one non-profit and can say with absolute certainty that the expenditures you end up making to do the good work are NEVER as you wish they were, or as any given auditor would want them to be. There is simply no such thing as precision in the numbers, despite the implication that numbers inherently present. And this is under the best of circumstances, a situation that by all accounts does not apply to Mortenson's personal style, much less his international challenge.
What matters most, regardless of all the questions, is that Mortenson gets it done. Whether "it" is 14 schools or 141, classrooms filled on the day of a visit or not, happy board members or frustrated ones, outsized travel expenses or reasonable ones, Mortenson gets it done. He hasn't been sleeping on cold dirt floors in third world countries, hugging children whose heads are swimming with lice, braving freezing temperatures and providing free medical attention to people in remote places lacking clean water in order to become a millionaire. He's been doing things you and I would never dream of doing just to make the world a better place. If he's made mistakes, so be it. For all the good he's done he deserves better than the hollow sensationalism the media is hurling his way. And ours.
So there may be some ill-spent funds or poor fiscal choices. But, as one commenter points out, whatever amounts Mortenson has spent in the region they are more than what was spent before, and the international awareness he has raised is priceless. I'll add that it's far better than all the money on guns and bombs the US has spent there put together. Why are we not talking about the injustice of millions per day spent on death machines instead of a few million per year spent on awareness?
And finally, consider: what if, because of the stress of this ruckus and/or the hate it engenders, Mortenson's life is cut short? How will the media report that? What good will all this have done if it results in ending Mortenson's work or his very life?
Oh yeah, there would be the smug satisfaction of having pointed out a flaw. Good going, Krakour. Now why don't you turn your formidable power on the real criminals at the top of the Wall Street Food Chain? Oh that's right. That would take balls.