Ting-Yi Oeie was a victim of evil self-righteousness. Acts driven be evil self-righteousness stand as part of the reason why public education in the United States has by-and-large become a massive failure. Precisely what students in public school know is that they can exploit any loop-hole to their advantage, no matter how ludicrous doing so turns out to be. What happened to Mr. Oeie would be rather like someone prosecuting a person for having an unregistered gun in her possession, entirely ignoring the fact that the reason why the person has the gun in the first place is that she wrestled it from the hands of a criminal who was trying to murder someone with the gun.
This essay concludes with three poignant observations regarding the damage that has been wrought here.
Now, every conceivable explanation of his behavior makes it unequivocally clear that what Mr. Oeie was trying to do is determine which female student had been a victim of sexting. There was never any reason even to suspect, let alone wonder, whether Ting-Yi Oeie was interested in or involved in the trafficking of child pornography pictures.
What the case of Oeie brings out, and what is most frightening about the United States, is that nowadays too much credibility is given to implausible scenarios that have no basis in the actual reality of the moment.
The proof of this, ironically, is that the photo in question turned out not to be pornographic at all. And this is what an examination of matters made abundantly clear. In the end, it turns out that there was no nudity at all. Why, then, was Mr. Ting-Yi Oeie investigating anything? Because that is what he had been instructed to do by the principal.
Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne agreed to dismiss the charges that Loudon Count Prosecutor James Plowman had brought against Oeie. Alas, this victory comes a year and $150,000 later.
Unfortunately, it may very well be a Pyrrhic victory on several accounts.
1. To begin with, Mr. Oeie’s reputation has been sullied and there is the legitimate worry that it may have been sullied beyond repair. This is because the very media that can be relentless in reporting sensational news is anything but committed to reporting important news that is not sensational, even when that news would repair a person’s reputation. Then, too, a Google search of Mr. Oeie will first yield this story. And in a world where people do not read carefully and thoroughly, and where careful thinking has become a lost art, Oeie cannot count on internet surfers to come away with decent picture of the man he is.
2. Could anyone blame Mr. Ting-Yi Oeie if in the future he simply kept his distance from such matters? I think not. He was motivated by the desire to do what is right and that motivational structure was trampled upon like so much dirt. Few things make a person more disinclined to act on behalf of another than the reality that, contrary to all reasonable evidence, the person’s honorable motives are apt to be viewed in a most uncharitable light by either the individual who is being helped or those who witness the intended act of good will.
To take a simple case, I myself have witness a number of situations in which men have refrained from helping a woman who was obviously very much in need of assistance, because no doubt they—the men—did not want to run the risk of being labeled sexist.
3. The greatest loss, however, is to the children themselves. Parents are forever crying about the importance of schools being a safe environment for children. Well, that state of affairs cannot be achieved if school administrators and teachers are not invested with a measure of moral authority.
Painfully, the experience of Mr. Oeie has been rather like a black hole in the bowels of hell, sucking out just about every ounce of moral authority that school administrators and teachers could have. Although this outcome was perhaps not the intent of prosecuting Mr. Oeie, precisely this outcome is absolutely the most significant byproduct of prosecuting Oeie.
One can only wonder: What were the motives of James Plowman, the Prosecutor? I am afraid that it is simply not possible to attribute honorable motives to Mr. Plowman. Not only was there an explanation from the outset for why Mr. Oeie had the picture, it is also the case that the picture was at most a borderline case of a pornographic picture of a child. And it is this one and only picture that Oeie has and that is the motivation behind Plowman’s prosecuting Oeie.
Most painfully, what we have here two incongruous victories. On the one hand, we have one small but very important victory for an honorable person, namely Mr. Ting-Yi Oneie, who was committed to doing the right thing. On the other hand, we have a major and most unfortunate victory for evil itself, because the moral authority of school administrators and teachers has been severely compromised. This is the insidious lesson that nearly every child in school will take away from the moment. Indeed, a great many children will take this insidious lesson from the moment precisely because their parents will teach it to them. So it is thanks to the evil self-righteousness of James Plowman, the Prosecutor.
