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Macomb, IL – A New Year's letter to my son
Dear Russell:
In this, my 17th New Year's note to you, it strikes me that your mind is developing into a provocative blend of legalistic and poetic. Since you're a graduate of a liberal-arts college and halfway through law school, that makes sense - and it makes more appropriate this line I wanted to share. It's attributed to both jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (and neither can be verified as its source - but it's smart philosophy): "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
The mistakes we've made and the achievements to come aren't as important as the people we are. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone achieves something, but if we humbly learn from our mistakes and modestly learn from our triumphs, they build character - and we need not worry about the consequences.
As filmmaker Spike Lee more succinctly put it: "Do the right thing."
That might seem obvious, or it might seem challenging - especially when cultural pressures seem to value affluence over substance, power over service.
For instance, it's sensible to ask whether leaders really believe much of what they say, or they're merely pandering to their bases - stereotypes of their bases.
Often, Congress seems more like fallen clergy exploiting vulnerable members of their flocks, or corrupt union officials ripping off labor. Do they really believe in women's rights, or are they worried about women's votes? Do they really believe that making rich people richer will help society, or are they concerned about future "help" from wealthy patrons? Do politicians really believe in the role of representative government to do what individuals or even groups of folks cannot - defend the nation, build Interstate highways, protect drinking water, food or air, bring electricity or the web to rural America, ensure domestic tranquility?
(After all, what most Americans really want, according to poll after poll, is plain: health insurance for everyone, an honest financial sector, the right to unionize if they want to, U.S. troops home, and Social Security protected from Wall Street privatization schemes.)
Ignoring people's preferences can mean success if such leaders are confusing or pit one part of the nation against another part. But such success isn't worth it, and that selfish disconnect need not be mimicked. Do what's right. Expect nothing.
Father Daniel Berrigan recently summed it up nicely: "You have no right to tie yourself in knots because you want to know the outcome of what you are doing. Let it go into history. Play it and pray it well."
Remembering his mentor Dorothy Day of Catholic Worker, Berrigan added, "We may never see the good outcome of the good we do. The outcome will take care of itself; the outcome is no concern of yours. Do it anyway."
That echoes author Kent Keith's fun "Paradoxical Commandments" book, with recommendations like "The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow; do good anyway."
Berrigan, a Jesuit like the guys that run your university, added, "Everything comes out of a community sense that we can do something together, that we can face our fears and our future and our families because of community, and our community is at least relatively independent of success."
Berrigan paused during that November speech and added, smiling, "It'd better be."
I started with a quote, and I'll end with one: As it's said - and sung - "Be good for goodness' sake."
Love,
Dad
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University