And the Word for Today is, Believe it or Not: Honorable

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.