Knowing

Recently, I asked one of my students, “but how do you know the government is corrupt? As a journalist I would like to know where this notion comes from, where’s the proof? After all, newspaper accounts of corruption are few and often anecdotal. There aren’t ‘paper trails’, trials, or publicized admissions of guilt.”

The student smiled first as although to say, ‘it is so obvious, so pervasive that proof is unnecessary.’ But then the student added, “When people come to our house my mother makes a cake but if I ask her for a piece she will deny there is a cake. I may have peeked around the door and seen her make it and put it up in the cupboard. Yet she will deny there is a cake. It’s the same with corruption.”