GREENSBORO – The United States has had more than its share of moral failure. From the Trail of Tears to the My Lai massacre there is plenty for us to be ashamed of. But with our democratic institutions, our Constitutional rights and the power of dissent, for 250 years, we have struggled to be a more perfect union. To Lincoln, despite our shortcomings, we were the “last best hope of earth.” To Reagan we were still “like a shining city on a hill.” Churchill is alleged to have said, “Americans always do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
Moral leadership has always mattered. At the outset of World War I Theodore Roosevelt wrote: “. . . we must never act . . . without regard to the essentials of genuine morality . . . “ During the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt said the presidency was “preeminently a place of moral leadership.” When the Communist countries of Eastern Europe were collapsing Vaclav Havel wrote, “. . . politics is a matter of serving the community, which means that it is morality in practice.”
Moral leadership matters especially to young people. As a high school debate coach, I have seen the incivility, language and behavior of our President filter into America’s secondary schools. I spent years working with young, idealistic students in countries like Latvia and Ukraine. They were determined to build new democracies. And I have watched our President and Vice President mock those hopes by embracing autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban.
From threatening to take Greenland by force, to sending thugs into the streets of Minneapolis, to presidential social media posts that would get a high school student suspended, we have lost any semblance of moral leadership.
Human morals have evolved because we are all better off in a world that appreciates our responsibility for others. A world where we do for others, as we would have others do for us, is healthier and safer than a world that says it is dog-eat-dog and every man for himself. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, it is largely because we have learned that we are better off with justice than we are with the alternative. That arc has been long and its lessons have cost us dearly in bloodshed and suffering.
Enslaved people built Thomas Jefferson’s home, though Jefferson fully understood slavery was wrong. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he wrote, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” And God’s justice didn’t sleep forever. A Civil War and the deaths of three-quarters of a million people ultimately began to secure for Black Americans the rights Jefferson asserted were endowed by our Creator for “all men.” It would take another hundred years of lynchings and rights painfully and brutally denied before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 voting rights Act.
The twentieth century was the most blood-soaked century in human history. Between 15 and 22 million people were killed in World War I. Between 70 and 85 million people were killed during World War II. Ultimately that suffering gave birth to the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the Atlantic Alliance, the European Union and a deepening appreciation of our common responsibility for our neighbors here at home and around the world.
We ignore fundamental moral principles of honesty and truthfulness, of an elemental sense of justice, of our responsibility for others, and of basic human rights at our peril.
We live in a world where we ourselves need allies and partners and we too depend on the moral principles that gave birth to our Constitution, our courts and our alliances with nations that share those values.
Today we are led by a man who would send armed rioters to overthrow a free election, who is untethered from the truth and who wants the federal government to control state and local elections. Whether God is just or not, we should all be trembling for our country.
David Kelley is a lawyer. He is a former debate coach at South Burlington and Hazen Union high schools and a co-founder of PH International. He lives with his wife, Kelly Robinson, two dogs, two cats and two horses in Greensboro.
David Kelley is a Vermont attorney. He lives in Greensboro and is a former chair of the Hazen Union School Board. He was part of the legal team that represented more than two dozen rural elementary school districts that appealed forced mergers under Act 46.
