“Bubbe couldn’t stand an injustice, “ or so it was always said of Fanny Richardson, the great-grandmother after whom I’m named.

She was born in the Old Country and spoke only Yiddish. She had four daughters, one son, and no formal education. Bubbe was what was called a “poor relation” in pre-Social Security America. After her husband died, she shuttled among her five children, cooking briskets and playing canasta with her grandchildren.

Bubbe would fix after school snacks and listen intently for hours as the little girl who grew up to be the endlessly patient grandmother of my children gave minute-by-minute accounts of her day.

Bubbe did not live to see that little girl become a speech teacher, a television personality, and the first woman everything in Florida’s state university system. But Mom never forgot her debt to Bubbe.

“I used to think I was doing Bubbe a huge favor to ‘entertain’ her,” Mom would say. “She must have been bored to death. But she was teaching me that my voice mattered.”

I never thought to ask how, exactly, Bubbe acquired that tag-line that keeps her memory alive all these decades after she lived and died. But I suspect a connection between her ability to listen patiently, even to a small child speaking a different language, and her intolerance of injustice.

The ability to listen is fundamental to a just society. In Bubbe’s day, and now, it’s a skill that’s in very short supply.

As the Scarecrow in Oz observed, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.” We interrupt each other mid-sentence to disagree with what we think someone is about to say. Even at the Village Square it is necessary to issue frequent reminders against “team clapping”.

Communities that do justice, love mercy, and teach the little ones that their voice matters have a lot of Bubbes around. Mother’s Day is a good time to cook them a brisket and say “thanks for listening.”

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Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com

Photo credit: Sea Dream Studio, under Creative Commons License (2.0 generic)

“People always think they’re behaving ethically, even when they’re being hauled off in handcuffs,’ said Democrat editorial page editor-turned-Leon County Commission candidate Mary Ann Lindley at the Florida Chamber Foundation’s community conversation on ethics last week, co-sponsored by The Village Square and the Collins Center.

Paid professional ethicists, students, political people and garden variety taxpayers gathered at the Challenger Learning Center to consider the effects of ethics — or lack of ethics – on the economy.

If Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca had Power Point and an IMAX theater screen, he’d have given Florida Chamber Foundation President Dale Brill’s lecture. “There’s a role for corruption in the marketplace,” said Brill as he scrolled through a series of slides that proved it.

Far from endorsing bribery, Brill was merely restating recurring themes of human behavior familiar to readers of the Bible and viewers of cable news. If Greenstreet was central casting’s version of the tribal elder in every community who knows which people are for sale, and at what price, Brill is the avatar of 21st century professionals who make the business case for ethical behavior.

There are more of them than you think.

The Ten Commandments were good enough for God and for a long time, the Twitter version—do unto others—sufficed for the rest of us. But these days, America alone has 130 academic “ethics centers” with more on the way. In addition, there’s a small army of private consultants like Jonathan Low, who joined Brill in making the case that “it makes for a bad economy when “your customers, suppliers, lenders and investors don’t trust you.”

Low’s company, Predictiv Consulting, serves clients all over the world but his home is in Palm Beach County, which earned the name “Corruption County” as a parade of city and county officials were perp-walked out of their offices and into prisons in recent years.

Whether you’re talking about communities or corporations, believe Low when he says that much of its reputation resides with the folks at the top. If you’re looking for a sustainable business, or political career, there had better be no air between what you’re doing, and what you say you’re doing.

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Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com

Photo credit: George Bannister

Editor’s note: Tomorrow we host Dr. Byron Johnson, author of “More God, Less Crime” at Faith, Food, Friday. In the beginning of his book, Dr. Johnson tells a pretty convincing story about how he was discriminated against in his academic career over his religious beliefs. The person responsible for bringing Dr. Johnson to town is the very Reverend Allison DeFoor (a close friend of the author) mentioned in this piece. The irony of that required a peanut gallery observation: Perhaps we’ve got ourselves in a bit of a do-loop, with aggressive behavior begetting aggressive behavior – lather, rinse and repeat endlessly? And perhaps it’s a cycle we could reverse? Read all »

For anyone who has lived with or been around mental illness—and who has not?—Melancholia is a must-see movie.
 
The characters are richer and better looking than we are, but we have all been to the wedding at the center of this film. You don’t need a medical degree to know that the bride, Justine, is seriously unstable; you would be, too, if you’d grown up in her family. Read all »

Tonight, tonight…
 
Moviegoers will have the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film version of the groundbreaking Broadway musical West Side Story with a one-night only screening in theaters nationwide. 
 
Socialist movers, Ayn Rand shakers, and every politico in between should do us a favor and see it.
 
Most performing arts fans know that West Side Story is a scene-for-scene retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story.  The 20th century makeover of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of star-crossed lovers separated by their warring clans is set in a 1950s Manhattan slum.  Read all »

I know it’s fall when the Walgreen’s flu shot reminder arrives in my mail.
 
This time each year, I take my personalized, computerized paperwork and thirty bucks cash on the barrelhead to my neighborhood Walgreen’s. In minutes, the friendly staff pokes my arm and sends me on my way to a respiratory distress-free holiday season. Read all »

As Tallahassee’s pols, pundits and power brokers gathered around the TV last Thursday to reinforce opinions they’ve already formed about the job performances of President Obama and Congress, a far more uplifting show unfolded at Ruby Diamond Auditorium. 

Filmmaker Spike Lee was in town to give his director’s cut on the meaning of life.  The crowded house of mostly FSU-FAMU-TCC students hung on his every word.  The kids’ eyes widened and their heads nodded in recognition as Lee, 54, described the recessionary summer between his sophomore and junior year.  Read all »

(Originally printed in The Miami Herald) For people who came of age in the 20th century, hometown newspapers were practically members of the family. You knew it was time to wake up when you heard the newsprint snap, crackle and pop as Mom pulled out the editorials and the grocery coupons and handed the front page and sports to Daddy. Read all »

This is my sixth Father’s Day without my father. I can’t say that I miss the heart-to-heart talks because we didn’t have very many.  Like most men of what Tom Brokaw christened “the greatest generation,” Daddy wasn’t an emo guy.  
 
When I was away at school, my mother and grandmother and even my big brother would send me cards and letters filled with neighborhood gossip and newspaper clippings and “I can’t wait ‘til you’re home’ “s.
 
Daddy did not write letters.  Instead, he’d cook up excuses for unannounced visits and it annoyed me no end to be “checked up on.”  Read all »

Radio and cable talk show host Ed Schultz calls himself “The Nation’s Number 1 Progressive Voice.”

This week, he progressed to the Misogynist Hall of Fame with his radio reference to fellow opinionator Laura Ingraham as a “slut.”   Schultz managed to use the word twice in one sentence, which is one time more than would have gotten past the Village Square Civility Bell.

Impulse control is not one of Schultz’s strengths. Last summer, the New York Post reported his “meltdown in the [MSNBC] 30 Rock newsroom.”  Schultz was enraged that the marketing folks ran commercials that he wasn’t in. When his huffing and puffing failed to win hearts and minds, he slammed down the telephone and shouted, “I’m going to torch this [bleep]ing place.” Read all »

What if it had been Three Wise Women instead of Three Wise Men? They would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, brought practical gifts….and, we’d have world peace. –Unsourced Internet Joke 

Good Morning America’s Claire Shipman and Katty Kay of the BBC don’t generally read those Internet jokes sent by folks with good hearts and too much time on their hands. 

As broadcast journalists with hard news beats and high maintenance family lives, the impulse to open an email that’s been forwarded fifteen times is rare.

Lucky for us, Ms. Kay did open the Wise Women email, and it inspired her and Ms. Shipman to collaborate on Womenomics: Work Less, Achieve More, Live Better.  Thanks to the Friends of the (Leon County Public) Library, Ms. Kay was in town this afternoon to talk about the book, which makes the case that it is possible to “write your own rules for success” and “stop juggling and struggling and finally start living and working the way you really want.”  Read all »

Back in the Jurassic Journalism Day, The Florida Bar’s Media Law Conference was a national venue of choice for lawyers, judges and journalists who were serious about making their “separate, yet equally important groups” better serve the public.
 
In the Conference’s early years, it was painfully fresh in the minds of Floridians that it had taken a young St. Petersburg Times reporter named Martin Dyckman to give the Florida Supreme Court a badly-needed ethics enema. Two justices were forced off the Court and a third obliged to take a sanity test as a result of Mr. Dyckman’s reporting.
 
Embarrassed at the legal profession’s failure to keep its own house in order, a string of post-Watergate Florida Bar Presidents worked hard to restore public trust, in part by keeping the lines of communication to the Watchdog Estate well-lubricated.  
 
Always on the prowl for opportunities to work sources, Florida’s editors and publishers were happy to help the Bar build the Conference into a Brigadoon for constitutional junkies. Read all »

Beating Justice: The Martin Lee Anderson Story, should be required viewing for Rep. Rachel Burgin (R-Tampa) and Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff (R-Ft. Lauderdale), the sponsors of a misguided and pernicious change to Florida’s public records law that seems to be on a fast track in the Florida legislature. Read all »