Transcriber: Delia Bogdan Reviewer: Denise RQ
In the northwest corner of the United States,
right up near the Canadian border,
there's a little town called Libby, Montana.
And it's surrounded by pine trees
and lakes, and just amazing wildlife,
and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.
And in there is a little town called Libby,
which I visited,
which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.
And in Libby, Montana,
there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield.
She always felt a little bit of an outsider,
although she's been there almost all her life
—a woman of Russian extraction.
She told me that when she went to school,
she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing.
Later in life, she got a job going house to house
reading utility meters, gas meters, electricity meters.
And she was doing the work in the middle of the day.
And one thing particularly caught her notice, which was,
in the middle of the day, she met a lot of men who were at home
— middle-aged, late middle-aged —
and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks.
Struck her as strange.
Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59,
five days before he was due to receive his pension.
"He'd been a miner," she thought,
"he must just have been worn out by the work."
But then, a few years later,
her mother died,
and that seemed stranger still,
because her mother came from a long line of people
who just seemed to live forever.
In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day and learning how to waltz.
It didn't make sense
that Gayla's mother should die so young.
It was an anomaly
and she kept puzzling over those anomalies
and as she did, other ones came to mind.
She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg
and went in the hospital and she had a lot of X-rays.
Two of them were leg X-rays, which made sense,
but six of them were chest X-rays, which didn't.
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parent's life,
trying to understand what she was seeing.
She thought about her town.
The town had a vermiculite mine in it.
Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners,
to make plants grow faster and better.
Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts;
huge amounts of it, put under the roof
to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters.
Vermiculite was in the playground,
it was in the football ground, it was in the skating rink.
What she didn't learn until she started working this problem,
is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.
When she figured out the puzzle,
she started telling everyone she could.
What it happened, what had been done to her parents,
and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks,
at home, in the afternoons.
But she was really amazed, she thought:
"When everybody knows, they will want to do something."
But actually, nobody wanted to know.
In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling the story
to her neighbours, to her friends, to other people in the community,
that eventually, a bunch of them got together and made a bumper sticker
which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said:
"Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."
But Gayla didn't stop.
She kept doing research.
The advent of the Internet definitely helped her.
She talked to anybody she could.
She argued and argued and finally she struck lucky
when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area.
And she told him her story,
and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her,
but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research,
and he realised that she was right.
So, now, she had an ally.
Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know.
They said things like: "Well, if it were really dangerous,
someone would have told us."
"If that's really why everyone was dying,
the doctors would have told us."
Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs, said:
"I don't want to be a victim, I can't possibly be a victim,
and anyway, every industry has its accidents."
But still, Gayla went on,
and finally succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town
and to screen the inhabitants of the town,
15,000 people.
And what they discovered
was that the town had a mortality rate
80 times higher than anywhere in the United States.
That was in 2002,
and even at that moment,
no one raised their hand to say:
"Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing.
It's lined with vermiculite."
This wasn't ignorance.
It was willful blindness.
Willful blindness is a legal concept
which means if there's information that you could know and you should know
but you somehow manage not to know,
the law deems that you are willfully blind,
you have chosen not to know.
There's a lot of willful blindness around these days.
You can see willful blindness in banks,
when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.
You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated
and everyone around knew what was going on,
but everyone studiously ignored it.
You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church,
where decades of child abuse went ignored.
You could see willful blindness
in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those,
and it also exists on very small scales,
in people's families, in people's homes and communities,
and particularly, in organizations and institutions.
Companies that had been studied for willful blindness,
can be asked questions like:
"Are there issues at work
that people are afraid to raise?"
And when academics have done studies like these
--of corporations in the United States--
what they find is 85% of people say yes.
85% of people know there's a problem,
but they won't say anything.
And when I duplicated the research in Europe,
asking all the same questions,
I found exactly the same number,
85%.
That's a lot of silence.
It's a lot of blindness.
And what's really interesting
is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me,
"This is a uniquely Swiss problem."
And when I go to Germany they say,
"Oh yes, this is the German disease."
And when I go to companies in England, they say:
"Oh yeah, the British are really bad at this."
And the truth is
this is a human problem.
We're all,
under certain circumstances,
willfully blind.
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear,
they're afraid of retaliation,
and some people are blind because they think:
"Well, seeing anything is just futile, nothing's ever going to change.
If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq war,
nothing changes, so why bother?
Better not to see this stuff at all."
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say:
"Well you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers,
and we all know what happens to them."
So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers
which says, first of all, they're all crazy.
But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers
is, actually, they're very loyal
and quite often, very conservative people.
They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for
and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing,
is because they care so much about the institution
and want to keep it healthy.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers
is: "Well, there's no point
because you see what happens to them,
they're crushed, they're destroyed.
Nobody would want to go through something like that."
And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers,
the recurrent tone that I hear, is pride.
I think of Joe Darby.
We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib,
which so shocked the world
and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq.
But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby,
the very obedient, good soldier
who found those photographs
and handed them in.
And he said:
"You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out,
but some things just crossed the line.
Ignorance is bliss, they say,
but you can't put up with things like this."
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor,
who fought for five years
to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon
who was killing babies.
And I asked him why he did it, and he said:
"Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it.
She came up to me one night and she just said:
Dad, you can't let the kids die."
Or I think of Cynthia Thomas,
a really loyal army daughter and army wife,
who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq war,
was so shocked by their mental condition,
and the refusal of the military to recognise and acknowledge
Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,
that she set up a café
in the middle of a military town
to give them legal, psychological, and medical assistance.
And she said to me:
"You know Margaret, I always used to say
I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up,
but I found myself in this cause
and I'll never be the same."
We all enjoy so many freedoms today,
hard-won freedoms:
the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship,
a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary.
A freedom to vote,
which women in particular had to fight so hard for.
The freedom for people of different ethnicities,
and cultures, and sexual orientation,
to live the way that they want.
But freedom doesn't exist,
if you don't use it.
And what whistleblowers do,
and what people like Gayla Benefield do,
is they use the freedom that they have.
And what they're very prepared to do
is recognise that "yes, this is going to be an argument,
and yes, I'm going to have a lot of rouse
with my neighbours and my colleagues and my friends.
But I'm going to become very good at this conflict.
I'm going to take on the naysayers
because they'll make my argument better and stronger.
I can collaborate with my opponents
to become better at what I do."
These are people of immense persistence,
incredible patience,
and an absolute determination
not to be blind
and not to be silent.
When I went to Libby, Montana,
I visited the asbestosis clinic
that Gayla Benefield brought into being.
A place where, at first,
some of the people, who wanted help and needed medical attention,
went in the back door,
because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right.
I sat in a diner and I watched
as trucks drove up and down the highway
carting away the earth out of gardens,
and replacing it
with fresh uncontaminated soil.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me
because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.
And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?"
I said: "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity,
and she's not an expert,
and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint.
The really important thing about Gayla
is she's ordinary."
She's like you, and she's like me.
She had freedom,
and she was ready to use it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)