A teacher once told me that “For emphasis and clarity, good writers often place the most important idea at the end of a sentence.” I remembered his comment recently when I was having morning coffee and reading — wait for it — reading the Declaration of Independence. I didn’t use to study our country’s founding documents over breakfast, but times of national crisis demand new routines. I was surprised to see that the Declaration ends with a sentence that itself ends with the word honor. How’s that for emphasis? Thomas Jefferson and his co-signers plainly wanted us to think about honor.
Seeing honor being given this much emphasis, I looked back over our brief but potent Declaration and formulated a small theory. I think the Declaration of Independence tries to answer this question: “During a national crisis, what does it mean to behave with honor?” And the Declaration provides an answer to its own question, starting as early as the first paragraph.
There the signers of the Declaration want us to think about decency. I’ll quote the exact phrase. The signers say that in a time of national crisis we must pay QUOTE “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” END QUOTE. To behave with decency, therefore, is to speak respectfully to others and take care to engage with their questions and their opinions. No wonder American soldiers in the Revolutionary War were horrified when the enemy killed American soldiers they had captured. The idea of decency was alive in the young nation. And from time to time we hear of it again.
In the 1950s, the honorable idea of decency made a remarkable appearance. As you may recall, a crass, innuendo-spouting, microphone-loving politician named Senator Joseph McCarthy used his access to TV cameras to cause fear and chaos in the country and to provoke a national crisis. Sadly, he’s a familiar type. A big part of McCarthy’s method was carrying out high-visibility character assassination in press conferences and government hearings. But finally someone called him on it. In a public hearing, with the news cameras rolling, after McCarthy attacked and tormented yet another person, a lawyer named Joseph Welch stopped him, saying, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness . . . . Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
So the idea of decency is tucked away in our founding documents, and from time to time somebody asserts the idea in public. If they didn’t, we’d probably lose track of it completely. But I don’t like just chanting words that have a patriotic history. In a time of national crisis, that’s weak sauce. We need better.
We won’t solve our current national crisis by consuming more heaping servings of chaos and innuendo, and we won’t save the democracy while sipping our morning coffee either. We’ve got a fight on our hands, but I’m pretty sure we won’t have democracy without decency.
Music: "Wrong Foot Forward" by Flook
