There are a lot of people weighing in on the dismissals or
resignations of famous men who have perpetrated, or have been very credibly
accused of having perpetrated, inappropriately sexualized behavior toward
women. Some have groped,
restrained, forcibly kissed, and some have exposed themselves, involved women
in their sexual release against the will of those women, and some have raped. Some have even raped children. There are so many discussions going on
about the behavior of these men that it’s absolutely maddening to listen, to
think about what these men have done, to ponder the state of the world in the
context of this horrid, reprehensible behavior.
What I don’t hear people talking about is whether some, or any, of these men
are honorable men. That sounds
very old-fashioned, now, doesn’t it?
I’m going to ask the question here, and I’m asking it for a few reasons,
not least of which is that I’d like to know what happened to honorability. Did Al Franken need to resign today? Yes, I think he did. Is he dishonorable in general and, therefore, irredeemable, or did he simply do dishonorable things? I don't know. Should Roy Moore, on the other hand, be horsewhipped? Yes. He should. At the very least he should go to jail and, as his opponent says, not the Senate.
My father told me a story once about my mother’s
ex-husband. My mother had married
this ex when she was 17, pressured into it by my grandmother and by the fact
that the man would soon be going to war.
She later divorced her first husband because he cheated on her – in her
own bed, while she was supposed to be at work. My father told me that everyone in the neighborhood knew
that my mother’s ex was a “skirt chaser”, and that men like that don’t usually
have a lot of friends. “You can’t
trust a guy like that.”, my Dad said.
“You can’t have him around your women.”
Now, please understand that my father was born in 1932, and
“your women” was a phrase that came naturally to him, along with a lot of other
phrases I wouldn’t use. But his
point was, if a man is not honorable, then he can be counted on to do
dishonorable things. My father was
an ex-cop, and though I know he wasn’t perfect, I also know that he taught me
that a person needs to have their integrity, their standards, their dignity and
their honor, or they were not a person worthy of collaborating with on any
aspect of the social contract. We
try to be a civilized society.
Sometimes, rather spectacularly, we fail. But we try, and we must try, and at the heart of our efforts
is a personal set of rules. We
follow these rules not because we will get “caught” if we break them, but
because there is a moral imperative that we have internalized.
In the decades in which America was founded, for a man to
call another man dishonorable in public was an egregious shame to the
accused. Of course there were men
who owned slaves – dishonorable in the extreme. We are no strangers to hypocrisy in America. In 1991, the country watched a very
credible accusation of sexual impropriety develop into a monumental hypocrisy
when Anita Hill was, ultimately, not believed and Clarence Thomas was appointed
to the Supreme Court, where he sits to this day. He is literally called “Your Honor” every day of his working
life.
Is a sense of personal honor passé, and, if it is, why am I
writing about it now? I’m writing
about honor because it’s something I can, and do, believe in, even when I can’t
necessarily believe in the judicial process, or my own government, or even that
karma will out. I’m writing about
honor here because I can, and I must, choose, every day, to surround myself
with honorable people, or my own, individual life is doomed to chaos and
misery.
I will try, first of all, not to enter into a mutually
exploitive relationship with a dishonorable employer. This can be complicated if one finds oneself employed by a
large corporation that pollutes or exploits the poor and, yet, one really
desperately needs the job. I can
say, though, that working for companies that are based on dishonorable
endeavors eventually weighs on an honorable person’s conscience, and the
relationship must end. I can say that first hand.
I will not use my democratically endowed vote to support
dishonorable men or women. The job
of a politician is to allocate resources, and to do so without abusing their
power or betraying the trust of their constituents that they will allocate
those resources fairly and honestly.
Feel free to laugh at the use of the word “honestly”, yes, I know, we
all equate the word “dishonest” with the word “politician” far too often. But there are politicians that take
their jobs as resource-allocators seriously. They do not advocate using our tax dollars to fly their
friends around to golf weekends.
They do not create legislation designed to steal meager resources from
citizens living below the poverty line and distribute the ill-gotten gains to
people who already have so much money that they don’t even know how much money
they have. And they do not parse
citizens living in a democracy into different groups, based on religion, sex,
sexual preference, region, means, skin color, health, height, weight, or any
other ridiculous “difference” and bestow resources unequally based on their own
irrational judgments about those differences.
I will not call dishonorable persons my friends. I may be related to them by blood. I may work with them. I may run into them at the grocery
store because they are my neighbors.
But they are not my friends, and I will not attempt to rely on them,
though there are circumstances in which they can, and will, rely on me because I
try to be an honorable
person. My responsibility toward
them is clear – I will be kind because I must be. I will call them out when their behavior is
inappropriate. I will not tolerate
them exploiting others in my presence.
But dishonorable people do not have a place in my emotional life, and if
I behave badly myself I will expect not to be welcome in other’s lives.
Were I in the military, I would hope I would not follow a
dishonorable person into battle, or fight in a dishonorable war, but I know
that there were men and women of honor who fought in Iraq and acquitted
themselves bravely and well, even though the reason for them being there was
political, and financial, rather than moral.
Were I a parent, I would hope I would raise my children to
exhibit empathy, kindness, discernment, and strength so that they would grow up
to be honorable adults. They would
have what my father would call “manners” – we have manners because we don’t
choose to make others uncomfortable.
But my children would also be taught that no human being should be
objectified. I would make it clear
to them, as often as necessary, that other people are not things for you to use
or not use. I would teach them
this whether they were boys or girls, and if they dishonored themselves I would
take that as a stain on my own personal sense of integrity – it would, most
certainly, show that I had failed in my responsibility to raise them correctly.
It seems now, to so many of my friends, that America has
revealed itself in these past 12 months as a haven for the despicably
dishonorable, reveling in the exploitive and dangerously destructive behaviors
of monstrous perverts, tyrants, oligarchs, the desperately stupid, the venal
and the vicious, and, in the case of Donald Trump, the demented. I also still harbor the belief, slender
though it may be, that the constitutional democracy that we have built can also
be a secure and prosperous home for the honorable, the good and kind, the fair
and the pragmatic. There is hard
work ahead of us, for those of us who have a vision of restoring this country
to some semblance of sanity and compassion. We are, many of us, very tired. And we don’t really know what in the hell to do about fixing
these horrific, hellacious lapses in the moral fiber of the people who seem,
now, to be running things.
Begin by aligning yourself with those who combine their
wisdom and cleverness with a sense of integrity. If you know them, give them a place of honor in your
lives. Work to help them
work. Use your vote, your time,
your energy, your experience, and your own personal resources, no matter how
small they might be, to further the goals of a generous and tolerant social
group. And understand that
supporting the dishonorable person in their dishonorable cause dishonors you,
and may do so irreparably.
