Board Golf Members Outed

The following Board members are golf members:

Karla Karash

Morris McInnes

Phil Webber

Peter Kershaw

Andrea Sodano

In addition there are those living on the golf course enjoying the luxury of the lush fairways, manicured greens and perfect sand traps including:

Maynard Goldman

Morris McInnes

Beverly Austin

By their actions and inactions it is clear that Board Members are first and foremost loyal to Board Members and the Board’s agenda which is high-end luxury living at the expense of the less affluent members of the Eastman Golf Resort. To a person, each of them can take credit for destroying openness, transparency and member participation at Eastman. Each is responsible by their individual silence, for the ongoing financial oppression of many Eastman owners who have no direct say on decisions, and of the travesty of Eastman financial documents.

However when all is said and done, each of us who has lived here and done little more than write an occasional email, is ultimately responsible for the destruction of the Eastman community. We individually and collectively, are no different than those at Penn State who chose not to speak up at the wrongs that occurred there. Yes a few here, some even of good economic circumstances, have stuck their necks out and have spoken up only to be trashed by governance members and by some of those who will now pay the piper for their silence and cooperation with the powers of Eastman. Like the many at Penn State who chose not to see what was going on, the many at Eastman have done likewise. It's an often repeated story that David Brooks catches so well in his story (NY Times 11/14/2011):

LET'S ALL FEEL SUPERIOR. This sheds some light on the behavior of governance members and perhaps all of us here at Eastman. Mr. Brooks addresses the idyllic thought process that we might act differently if we were in Joe Paterno's shoes etc. He paints a crystal clear picture that what people think they would do under difficult circumstances, in fact is not what they actually do. He refers to what is called “Normalcy Bias”, which is the tendency of people who find themselves in unsettling circumstances to shut down and pretend everything is normal. He then talks about “Motivated Blindness”; they don't see what is not in their interest to see.

Later he states "People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don't. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman  and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, Blind Spots, “when it comes time to make a decision our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear."

He concludes the article with the following statement "the proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive......?

That was the proper question after Abu Gharib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. It's a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature."

(See eastmanblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/are-eastman-governance-members.html)

We can also look to the seminal work by Eric Fromm "Escape From Freedom" to understand why people follow a leader ignoring the consequences. Then there was Hannah Arendt’s work that many Jews rejected because they didn't want to acknowledge that they were part of what happened in its early stages. See: eastmanblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/unintended-consequences.html

In 1963, the German political theorist Hannah Arendt made a convincing case that the principal cause of the Holocaust lay not in the inherent evil of Nazi leaders like Hitler and Eichmann but rather in the tendency of ordinary people to conform to "mass opinion”, without fully reflecting upon the results of their action or inaction. Does a similar "mass opinion mentality" dominate the ordinary people of Eastman?

Yes. By our silence each of us owns the arrival of the Eastman Golf Resort. By our silence each of us owns the funny financials. By our silence each of us owns the false claims and disparagement of others --and now the community as it once was is history.

Submitted by Robert Logan