The Age of Apology

For eight years no one, except for the weatherman when he missed the scattered storms and you forgot your umbrella, took the time to admit to any mistakes.

Times have changed.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the originator of the mighty Kindle (which I love) posted this after deleting from people's Kindles and from their Amazon.com computer-libraries, copies of the George Orwell classic 1984, among others, without warning:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers, Jeff Bezos Founder & CEO Amazon.com

Ironically, it was the novel 1984 that was deleted. The entire episode revealed the vulnerability of using a Kindle in terms of the ability of Amazon to continue to fiddle with readers' downloads. In this instance, Amazon removed entire books, could it also just remove portions of books, articles from newspapers? Being wired means being connected, with many privacy implications, some quite scary.

The President of the United States also engaged in some apologizing yesterday, after his improvised remarks at his press conference about the Henry Louis Gates' arrest in Cambridge, riled police across the country.

So we got an apology from President Obama, too: “I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.”

Suddenly I feel like we are a nation of grownups again. Now that might be overly optimistic, after listening to the Republican defense of the health care status quo, but adult behavior is being modeled for us once again. It takes courage to apologize, it takes character.