[HPforGrownups] Re: Dumbledore's mistakes

[T.M. Sommers]

No: HPFGUIDX 75486

Steve wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "T.M. Sommers" <tms2 at m...> wrote:
>>Richelle Votaw wrote:
>> >
>> > 1) Not telling Harry about the prophecy to begin with.  A
>> > mistake?  Maybe.  May also have been a mistake to tell an
>> > eleven year old ...
> 
>>T.M.:
>>Telling him would have, among other things, played right into 
>>Voldemort's plans by making Harry curious ...edited...
> 
> bboy_mn:
> 
> This is going to sound odd at first, but Dumbledore's mistake was not
> 'telling Harry' or not 'telling Harry', it was taking an all or
> nothing approach. See, I told you it was odd.
> 
> The logical and safest and least tempting toward mischief would have
> been to use a graduated approach. Again another odd one, he should
> have told Harry the whole truth from the beginning, just not ALL of
> the whole truth. Is any of this making sense?
> 
> In the beginning, he should have told Harry a generalized version of
> the whole truth, or to look at it another way, a superficial version
> of the whole truth. Then as each year went by and Harry became more
> mature, Dumbledore should have fleshed it out with a few more details.
> That way Harry would have alway had some idea of what was going on,
> but at the same time, he wouldn't have had to know the full exteme
> meaning.
> 
> So, I guess you could call that a layered approach; each year adding
> another layer of details to the basic truth. 

He could have done that, in fact, he did do something like that. 
  But it isn't clear that had he given more detail earlier things 
would have worked out better.  Harry was not in the mood to 
believe anything anyone told him that he didn't want to believe. 
  Phineas's description of Harry's attitude was 100% accurate.

>> > 3) Seemingly not noticing (or not doing anything about it)
>> > that Sirius was rapidly deteriorating while basically kept
>> > caged.
> 
>>Since when is that Dumbledore's responsibility? ...
> 
> Since when is it any friends responsibility to notice when a friend is
> sinking into dispare, especially, when you as a friend are
> contributing to that dispare (obvious hint of sarcasm)?

Then it was Lupin's responsibility, not Dumbledore's; there is no 
reason to assume any special friendship between Dumbledore and 
Sirius.

> We can all look back and say he should have done this or he should
> have done that, but that is the luxury of hindsight on our part. On
> the other hand, we would like to think that Dumbledore has some gift
> of foresight, but sadly, by his own admission, he dropped the ball on
> this one. 

I'm not sure that he was being entirely candid when he said that; 
he may have been assuming some of the blame that should have 
belonged to Harry in order to make Harry feel better, or at least 
less bad.