Sometimes, someone has to speak up June 18, 2007
Posted by Scarecrow in 06/03/07 North Jersey Media.trackback
Sometimes, someone has to speak up
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Paramus school officials kept quiet. In the Fort Dix case, one man didn’t.
Mike Kelly is a Record columnist. He can be reached at kellym@northjersey.com.
RAVO Brian Morgenstern.
Bravo who?
Yes, Brian Morgenstern. He’s 23 years old, a clerk at a Circuit City store and, it turns out, a key figure in the FBI investigation of an alleged terror plot to murder soldiers at Fort Dix.
It was Morgenstern who picked up the phone and called police in early January 2006 after a customer brought a video tape to a Circuit City store in Camden County where he works and asked to have the video copied to a DVD.
Morgenstern did not need to call the cops. After all, he was just a clerk in an electronics store. But Morgenstern happened to watch the video and worried, with another clerk, about the meaning of what he saw — a group of men firing guns at a shooting range and chanting “Allah Akbar,” which means “God is great” in Arabic.
Was this a terrorist video?
A joke?
A group of amateur actors?
Morgenstern did not believe it was his job to answer any of those questions. But he felt it was his duty to alert authorities. That was the least he could do.
Opening door
It turns out that Morgenstern’s phone call was hugely significant. It sparked a 15-month FBI investigation that culminated in the arrests of six New Jersey men last month. But almost lost in the rush of news stories about the so-called Fort Dix terror plot was Morgenstern’s explanation of why he made that phone call.
“We, as citizens, have a duty for our country to speak up if we see something that needs to be reported,” Morgenstern told CNN in one of several media interviews last week.
How refreshing. How fundamentally pure. A “duty” to “speak up.”
But how sad, too.
The reason Morgenstern’s explanation is so laudable is that it is so rare. Far too many of us find justification not to speak up. Instead of taking a risk and getting involved, far too many of our lives are framed by the all-too-familiar logic of “don’t get involved; it’s none of your business.”
This sort of logic may have been at work several months ago when a college student from North Carolina was struck by a car on Route 4 in Fort Lee. Yes, the driver who hit the student stopped. But police say several cars just kept going. Why didn’t they get involved? Did they think it was none of their business?
Sadly, another version of this logic was at work in Paramus in recent months, when school officials decided not to warn parents and teachers that the soil at a middle school was laced with high levels of pesticides. Instead of speaking out publicly and taking a risk of sounding an alarm, Paramus school officials shrouded themselves in a legal excuse. Or as the tone-deaf Paramus School Superintendent Janice Dime put it: “There was no requirement to remove the soil.”
Destructive silence
In other words, Dime believed she would do only what the law required her to do, nothing more, nothing less. And so she kept silent.
Brian Morgenstern could have kept his mouth shut, too. There is no law that required him to call the cops after he watched that weird video of men firing guns and chanting in Arabic. The video was none of his business, after all. He was just a clerk being paid to copy the tape to a DVD.
Why not just mind his own business?
Luckily, he understood the moral dimension of not getting involved and minding his own business – namely, that minding his own business meant that he would ignore a possible terrorist plot. Ironically, critics have accused him of grandstanding by going public.
But in speaking up, Morgenstern also made another discovery that is worth savoring.
“I was considering whether or not this was really a threat or something serious,” he told The Associated Press. “I came to the conclusion that’s not my job or decision to make.”
In other words, it was someone else’s job to figure out the meaning of the video, whether it was the work of terrorists or just a group of goofy guys with guns. It was Morgenstern’s job to sound an alarm and pass on his concerns.
Imagine if Janice Dime had felt that way in Paramus when she learned five months ago that the soil only 30 feet from the West Brook Middle School was tainted with three pesticides at levels 39 times higher than safety guidelines. Of course she is not qualified to determine whether the pesticide-laced soil was a serious threat to students’ health. That’s the job of scientists and public health experts. But it was Dime’s moral duty to tell parents the basic facts – that toxic soil had been discovered and that health experts were examining the implications for students and teachers in the school.
Morgenstern conceded that he struggled with his choices and what he explained was a “moral dilemma.” On one hand, he was bothered by what he saw on the video. On the other, he worried that he was invading the privacy of the men in the video by calling the cops. After all, in America people are free to make videos.
In the end, he decided that someone had to be told even if he was foolishly sounding a false alarm.
“We need to speak up,” Morgenstern said.
Remember those words.
Sadly, far too many forget them.
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