One in Ten

My captain told me once that he spent 90% of his time dealing with 10% of his soldiers. He was talking about how it was the problem children in the unit who required all of his attention, which made him feel like he was neglecting the rest of the unit.

And that problem isn't unique to the military, just about every large group suffers from it. Even us fencers. If you look through the rule books for the SCA, just about every decision in there can be traced to a single person (not all the same one, but still...).

I was taken to task over my last post, because it sounded like I was blaming all of the white scarves for what happened at Uprising. That wasn't my intention, and if it was taken that way, I appologize.

But, likewise, I cannot say that all of the White Scarves (either in Artemisia or the Knowne World) are the paragons of Truth, Justice and the Artemisian Way that we would hope they would be. In fact, I would go as far as to say that each and every one of them has had at least one lapse in judgement at one time or other, that's just part of being human. Unfortunately, just like in any group, there are a small few for whom these lapses of judgement go from occasional to fairly often.

And, thanks to good old Murphy, the bigger the lapse the more public it tends to be. This leads to the group being judged too often by our occasional mistakes, instead of by the numerous good deeds that surround them.

That is why I brought up the occurence at Uprising. Everyone makes mistakes, yes. But in order to offset these mistakes to the surrounding public, we need to be seen as being able to recognize them and show that we can take care of them, and the more in-house we can do it, the better.

So, why did I bring it up in a public forum? Wouldn't directly confronting the individuals about their actions have been better? If I'd have had names, yes. But I didn't. So, instead, I used the incident as a chance to remind everyone of the impact of their words.

Wheter this was the best choice or not, I don't know, but it has obviously gotten people's attention.