Everyone has different ideas about corruption, its appearance, how it was born, and the cost of it to civilization.  But I did get a clear view of it recently while at an event involving Don Jr. at Lori’s Roadhouse for a campaign event with Bernie Moreno, supporting him for senate.  At those kinds of positive events, there are always political people who show up, and as I arrived, I ran into Darbi Boddy, who wanted to attend and show support for the people there.  But, as this is a story that has all kinds of bad elements to it, Isaac Adi, the other school board member that I had been involved with to put conservatives on the board at Lakota schools; there has been a restraining order put in place keeping Darbi from being 500 feet from Isaac, essentially preventing her from attending school board meetings, because a bunch of political people want to get rid of Darbi off the school board and they are using Isaac to challenge her in court over a dispute the two of them have had where he claimed he was concerned for his safety.  This has resulted in Darbi losing her CCW and being unable to attend any event where Isaac was also present.  So when Isaac shows up at some political event that Darbi is at, she has to get up and leave, by the court order.  It’s an entirely ridiculous notion that a woman the size of Darbi was going to be some physical threat to Isaac Adi, who is a reasonably good-sized person, but that is what happens when your courts are corrupt and politics takes over logic.  As it stood, Darbi wanted to see Bernie Moreno, so I met her in the parking lot and scouted out the venue to make sure Isaac wasn’t there, which he wasn’t, so she entered and talked to people as she normally would.

About twenty minutes later, Isaac arrived, and as I watched him enter the building, I saw him walking in a way I had not seen before.  I’ve known him for a while and tried to help Isaac on several occasions, so I came to know him as a compassionate, nice Christian man.  This person he has become during his first two years on the school board was surprising to me.  I was most disappointed in him when he joined the labor union in laughing at my name when it was brought up in a school board meeting, as he joined the crowd in a mob-like free-for-all.  The criticism didn’t bother me; I expected that.  But that he played a part in it bothered me because I thought he was a better person than that and would not participate in those kinds of things.  But it wouldn’t be the first time someone like this let me down.  So I took note of it and moved on.  I have talked to Isaac occasionally, but I gave up on him over a year ago as he was politically useless.  It was an experiment that was tried, but when Lynda O’Connor went off-script, Isaac’s political future was tossed out the window.  So any interaction I had with him was minimal.  I had not seen enough of him to reveal the person he had become since he got caught up in this lawyer scam against Darbi, and the power of the courts had gone to his head in genuinely destructive ways.  He entered the building to sign in like Connor McGregor entering an MMA fight; he was slinging his arms out, counterbalancing his large belly in a very theatrical way, which was interesting.

Upon seeing this, I went to find Darbi to tell her that Isaac had arrived.  She immediately gathered her things to leave.  I offered to give her my hat and jacket so she could sit on the opposite side of the room, far away from Isaac, and attend the political rally anyway.  Nobody would have known the two of them were even close.  She declined the offer and said she had to honor the court order, so she left.  The whole thing was ridiculous; this court order put upon her for purely political reasons was taking away her liberty senselessly, and people weren’t doing anything about it to defend her, and all that power that Isaac suddenly had over her had gone to his head.  And he was enjoying that power way too much.  For something that was legally questionable, to begin with, it now was a power that a person like Isaac had over people in his community, a political rival, that was the most concerning.  And since I had not interacted with him much over the last few years, the corruption was evident.  What he was now was built by the corruption of politics and was a good lesson of everything that can go wrong and often does.  I knew him when the effort at elected office was full of good intentions, and he was promising.  And I can think of hundreds of people I have known, just like Isaac, who all started the same way.  But thousands of compromises later, and their shelf life near expiration, most of them fail and become corrupt to some level or another, and it was shocking to see how far Isaac had fallen in such a short time. 

When people stop doing what they know to be right or even think to be correct and serve institutional concerns, the process of corruption begins.  Then, corruption takes root when people like Isaac learn the kind of power they can have over other people given to them by the power of politics.  Soon after, they become one of the many who learn that institutional power compensates people who lack private power, so they seek the power of government to do what they lack the courage to do themselves.  And that is clearly what happened with Darbi and Isaac on the Lakota school board.  He lacked personal courage and was quickly swept away by the corrosive forces that enjoy making vast amounts of money off an institution that collects taxes from the public and distributes it for power, using children to extort the villainy.  And once he learned that he could have a lot of power from appeasing the institution over his values and peer groups, he knew what that power could give him.  In this case, he was able to meet celebrity political figures, and he could force Darbi to leave and deny her the same enjoyment through the power of the courts, which was given to him for other reasons, all corrupt in their own way.  We say corrupt because the relationship intends to abuse government power for personal gain.  Isaac might be a pawn in that game, but the seduction of the abuse of it was something he was enjoying, which encouraged more of the same behavior.  When the law is used to support personal power and punish other people who challenge that power, it is corrupt.  And when you look at the many millions of other such cases nationwide for many of the same reasons, you can see how our political landscape has become so corrupted.  The temptations to fall to corruption are too much for most people, and that is the case with the Lakota school board and the reason that Darbi Boddy had to leave that event.  Not because it was the right thing to do, but because political power had been abused to give power to private people they otherwise would have never had, if not for the power that government offers people willing to abuse it.

Rich Hoffman

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