MARGARET HEFFERNAN is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. She worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas.
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in the northwest corner
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the United States right up near the Canadian border
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as a little town called the montana
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and it's surrounded by pine trees
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and lakes and just amazing
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wildlife and these enormous trees is scream up into the sky
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and then there's a little town
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call to be which I visited
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which feels kind of lonely a little isolated
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and in Libby Montana this and rather unusual woman
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named Gayla Benefield she always felt a little bit of an outsider although she's
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almost all her life a woman Russian extraction
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she told me when she went to school she was the only girl who ever chose to do
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later in life she got a job
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going house-to-house reading utility meters
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gas meters electricity meters and she was doing the work
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in the middle of the day and one thing particularly quarter notice which was
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in the middle of the day she met a lot of men
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who at home middle-age late middle age
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and a lot of them seem to be oxygen tanks
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struck a strange then a few years later her father died at the age of 59 five
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days before he was due to receive his pension
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he'd be a minor she thought
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he must just been worn out either work but then a few years later
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her mother died and that seemed
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stranger still because her mother came from a long line of people
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who just seem to live forever in fact
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act galas uncle is still alive to this day and learning how to waltz
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it didn't make sense that Kayla's mother should I say young
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it was an anomaly she kept puzzling
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over anomalies and as she did other ones came to mind
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she remembered for example what her mother had broken a leg
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and went in the hospital and she had a lot of X-rays
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and two of them were like x-rays which made sense but six of them were chest
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which didn't sheep also been puzzled over
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every piece of her life and her parents live
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trying to understand what she was seeing
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she thought about her town town
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had a ver make you like mine it from Mickey light was used
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for soil conditioner tips to make plants grow faster and Asher
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for making light was used to insulate lofts
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huge amounts of it put onto the roof to keep house is warm during the long
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for make you I was in the playground it was in the football ground
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it was in the skating rink what she did not learn until she started working this
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his room a key ally so very hot toxic form
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up as best us when she figured out the puzzle
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she started telling everyone she could what it happen
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what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw
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on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons
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but she was really amazed she thought when everybody knows the want to do
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but actually nobody wanted to know in fact she became so annoying as she kept
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insisting on telling this story
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to her neighbors to her friends to other people in the community
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that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker
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which they proudly displayed on their cars which said
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yes I'm from Libby Montana and no
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I don't have asbestosis but gala didn't stop
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she kept doing research the advent of the Internet definitely helped her
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she talked anybody she could she argued and
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argued and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying
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the history of mines in the area
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and she told him her story and it first of course like everyone
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he didn't believe her but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research
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he realized that she was right
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so now she had and ally
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nevertheless people still didn't want to know they said things like well
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if it were really dangerous someone would have told us
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if that's really why everyone was dying the
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doctors would have told us
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some other guys used to very heavy job said
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wanna be a victim my car possibly be a victim and anyway
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every industry has its accidents
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but still gala went on and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to
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and just screen inhabitants have the town
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15,000 people and what they discovered
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was that the town had a mortality rate
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eighty times higher than anywhere
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in the United States that was in 2002
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and even at that moment no one raised their hand to say gala
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look in the playground for your grandchildren are playing
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its aligned with from a campsite
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this wasn't ignorance
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it was willful blindness willful blindness is a
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legal concept which means if this information that you could know and you
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but you somehow manage not to now
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the law deems that your willfully blind you have chosen
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not to now there's a lotta willful blindness around
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these days you can see willful blindness in banks
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when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them
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you could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated
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and everyone around you what was going on but everyone studiously ignored it
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you can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church
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where decades of child abuse went ignored
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you could see willful blindness in the run-up
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willful blindness exists on epic scales like those
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and it also exists so very small scales in people's families
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in people's homes in communities and particularly
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in organizations and institutions
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companies that have been studied for willful blindness
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can be almost questions like are there issues
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at book that people are afraid to raise
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and when academics have done studies like this corporations the United States
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what they find is eighty-five percent of people say yes
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eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem
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but they won't say anything and when I duplicated the research in Europe
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asking all the same questions I found exactly the same number
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eighty-five percent that's a lot of silence
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it's a lot of blindness and what's really interesting is it when I go to
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companies in Switzerland they told me
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this is a uniquely Swiss problem and when I go to Germany they say oh yes
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this is the german disease
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and when I go to companies in England they say oh yeah the British are
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really bad at this and the truth is
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this is a human problem where all
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under certain circumstances willfully blind
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what the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear
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they're afraid of retaliation and some people of
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are blind because they think well seeing anything is just
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it's just a few top nothings ever gonna change if we make a protest if we
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protest against the Iraq war
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nothing changes so why bother better not to see this stuff
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at all and the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time
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his people say well you know the people who do see
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their whistleblowers and we all know what happens to them
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so this this profound mythology around whistleblowers
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which says first of all they're all crazy
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but what I found on going around the world and talking to whistleblower life
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is Akshay they've very low oil
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quite often very conservative people their hugely dedicated to the
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institutions that they work for
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and the reason that they speak up the reason they insist on seeing
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is because they care so much about the institution
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and want to keep it healthy
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and the other thing that people often say about the supplies
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is well there's no point because you see
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what happens to them there crushed nobody would want to go through
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and yet when I talk to whistleblowers
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the recurrent time that I hear his pride
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I think I've Joe Dhabi we all remember the photographs
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evaporate grape which so shocked the world
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showed the kind of walk that was being fought in Iraq
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but I wonder who remembers Joe Dhabi
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the very obedient goods sold to
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who found those photographs and handed them
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in and he said he said you know
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I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out
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but some things just crossed the line ignorance is bliss they say but you
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can't put up with things like this
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I talked to Steve Paulson a British doctor
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who fought for five years to draw attention
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to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies
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and i also why he did it and he said well it was really my daughter
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who prompted me to do it she came up to be one night she just said dad you can't
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or i think is Cynthia Thomas a really loyal
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are made or to an army wife who as she saw her friends and relations coming
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back from the Iraq war
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was so shocked by their mental condition
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and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge
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post-traumatic stress and I'm that she set up
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cafe in the middle a military town
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to give them legal psychological and medical
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assistance and she said to me she said you know margaret
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I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up
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but I found myself in this cause
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at the home never be the same
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we all enjoy so many freedoms today
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hard-won freedoms the freedom to write
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and publish without fear censorship a freedom that wasn't here the last time I
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a freedom to vote which women in particular had to fight so hard for
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the freedom for people have different ethnicities and cultures and sexual
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to live the way that they want but freedom doesn't exist
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if you don't use it
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and what whistleblowers do and what people like Kayla Benefield do
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is they use the freedom that they have
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and what they're very prepared to do is recognized
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that yes this is gonna be an argument and yes I'm going to have a lot around
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with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends
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but I'm going to become very good this conflict
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I'm going to take on the naysayers because they'll make my
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argument Bachar and stronger
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I can collaborate with my opponents to be calm
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bash are at what I do
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these are people have immense persistence incredible patience
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and absolute determination not to be blind
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quite I went to live in montana
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I visited the asbestosis clinic
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the Gayla Benefield brought into being
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a place where at first some of the people
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who wanted help and needed medical attention
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went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge
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that she'd been right i sat in a diner
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and I waltzed as trucks drove up
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and down the highway carting away
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the love out of gardens and replacing it
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with fresh uncontaminated soil
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I took my twelve-year-old daughter with me because I really wanted her to me
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gala she said why what's the big deal
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said she's not a movie star and she's not a celebrity
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she's not an expert and galas the first person who would say
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she's not a saint the really important thing about Kayla
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she's ordinary she's like you
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and she's like me she
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had freedom and she was ready to use it
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thank you very much
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