Here’s The Thing About “a Few Bad Apples.” It Comes From “One Bad Apple Spoils The Bunch.”

Here’s the thing about “a few bad apples.” It comes from “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” And it’s true, if you have a barrel of apples and one is rotten, it will release ethylene gas. This will force the other apples to over-ripen and begin to rot as well. One bad apple isn’t an unfortunate addition. It’s a taint, the beginning of total decay, the ruination of an entire batch.

So if you have a bad apple, you spot it as soon as you can. You isolate it from the other, fresh apples. You throw it away with the trash. You DO NOT halfheartedly put the bad apple to the side, park it behind or desk or send it home with pay for a few weeks. You REMOVE it, permanently. You don’t take it out of the barrel and look the other way when it ends up in another district’s barrel, creating repeat offenses. 

You do not create a false brotherhood, a pack of apples, a code of “apples always stick up for apples, no matter what.” Because then that bad apple is still there. It has spread its decay and infested the whole crop, because no one wants to address the spreading and systemic badness of the apple.

You take that motherfucking bad apple and you throw it in the compost heap and let it shrivel into dirt into nothing before it can poison anything else. 

Otherwise, you don’t have one bad apple. You have a whole spoiled bunch. And then you gave that nasty, smelly, mealy, rotten orchard a bunch of riot gear and tell them they are better than the rest of the fruit on the farm and that it is their GOD GIVEN RIGHT to smash every pear, papaya, watermelon, strawberry, or pineapple that dissents.