Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Imagine being summoned before an arrogant government official and being told that as a result of accusations you would not be allowed to see, the official was going to involve herself in your life. The official was going to impose arbitrary restrictions on your freedom of association, make changes in your work environment that imposed intolerable conditions and forced you to resign your job, and would put things in your official records that would continue to follow you and cause you grief for years to come.

The only option you're offered is to acknowledge the power of the official over you, complying with her arbitrary demands and conditions. You are to continue to work as before, but you will now report directly to the official instead of your normal supervisor. Your continued employment will depend not on your work product, but on keeping the official happy. However, even if you accept your punishment willingly, you will still not be given a copy of the accusations to which you are pleading guilty.

In your mind you have been a conscientious and valued employee. Your supervisor has not told you about anything you've done wrong, and no official sanctions have ever been imposed on you before. You have not been charged with any crime. There has been no trial, hearings, or any semblance of due process. The official had already made up her mind that she was going to interfere with your life before your first meeting.

Perhaps even worse, when you turn to other officials and agencies, you discover they have been shown the accusations against you, and have already been intimidated into looking the other way. They are also unwilling to give you a copy of the accusations against you because they have been ordered not to by your primary antagonist.

Those few officials who's residual ethics haven't been entirely burned away from too many years in the bureaucracy, wash their hands and assuage their consciences by returning the information to your antagonist. But they also find their self interest speaks far louder than their outrage over the blatant violation of your rights, and they refuse to cross your antagonist and give you a copy of the secret accusations.

Your antagonist has no constitutional authority to do what she is doing, but fear of the organization she represents convinces everyone who might help you to turn away. Even those mandated to intervene in cases of official abuse of power decide they would rather violate their duty and oath of office rather than attract the wrath of your antagonist onto themselves.

Where is this happening? What government agency can cause so much grief without any need to justify its actions? The scenario sounds like countless victims of KGB harassment in the old Soviet Union, but it's happening today here in America.

Laurel Jones, a 4' dwarf in her 30's wouldn't have believed the above Kafkaesque nightmare possible until it happened to her. Laurel was employed as a shift supervisor in the University Microcomputer Lab at Portland State University (PSU), the stage on which the drama was played out.

I have known Laurel personally for many years. At one time she was even employed by my former company. She worked both in the department I directly supervised, and in other departments. I would have no qualms hiring her back now if my current company could afford another employee. I have always found Laurel's stature as a person far exceeded her diminutive size. Some larger but intellectually inferior individuals have had difficulties accepting Laurel's Mensa qualified mind and assertive personality, but that can hardly be considered her problem - except in the absurdly twisted logic of our times.

The antagonist in our story turns out to be the Affirmative Action Office at PSU. One would think that as a female and a dwarf, the Affirmative Action Office would be on Laurel's side. After all, the official justification for the whole concept of affirmative action was to reverse past discrimination against racial minorities, women, and those with disabilities. But government agencies lacking a clear mission and aggressive oversight regularly turn rogue, running roughshod over constitutional technicalities and anything else that obstructs their arrogant expansion of power.

The policy of using intentional discrimination as an officially sanctioned social engineering tool, commonly referred to as affirmative action, was launched claiming good intentions like all such government programs. The uncomfortable fact that the policy sanctioned discrimination and caused harm to individuals who could not possibly have personally participated in any of the alleged wrongs, was dismissed with alarming ease. The justification claimed for officially mandated discrimination was that it could somehow be right to cause harm if the intention was to achieve a greater good.

The concept of doing evil as a means of accomplishing good has a long and infamous history. And every time the use of evil as a tool for solving one problem has been justified, it becomes easy to justify using it to solve an ever growing number of real and imagined problems. The end result has been consistently tragic every time we've ventured down this slipper path. But memories become conveniently blank every time the experiment is proposed yet again.

Since its original mandate granted it the "right" to unilaterally interfere in people's lives, the Affirmative Action Office at PSU expanded its power to include investigating a wide variety of complaints and imposing "solutions". It comes as no surprise that the office found ways to interpret many problems as falling within their domain, and the solutions of choice included putting the supposed malefactors under the direct control of the office.

While my personal knowledge of Laurel makes me confident that she is innocent of what ever secret accusations have been made against her, anything she might be accused of pales to insignificance when compared to the actions of the Affirmative Action Office. It's been over a year since Laurel resigned from the lab under duress, but PSU continues to stonewall her demands for a copy of the secret accusations. She has filed a complaint with the Bureau of Oregon Labor and Industries, and also a wrongdoing claim with the Risk Management Division of the State of Oregon, claiming she has a right to her personnel file under the Freedom of Information Act. While there may be some in the soiled academic ivory towers of PSU who find the actions of the Affirmative Action Office repugnant, the University has so far elected to support and defend the office.

Not surprisingly, Laurel has also become active in efforts to ban all forms of discrimination - especially affirmative action.