Slow Down, Concentrate On Character

Dear Jennifer: I was in the grocery store and walked to the stack of daily papers. A guy was flipping through the Sunday paper. He took out the help wanted section and hid it inside a weekday paper. I was caught off guard. I sort of laughed and said, “I saw that.” He looked up at me with a tragic face. I realized he needed a job. I was sorry and he was humiliated.

If my brain had been working at its proper speed, I would have done it better. I am so sorry I muffed an opportunity. I should have bought the Sunday paper and given him the help wanted section with an extra $10 in stake money. He needed clean clothes and a shower.

I could have told him good luck and we could have had a prayer together. - Ingrid

Dear Ingrid: Your letter raises the problems of an age where shame has been abandoned but nothing seems to have taken its place. Few of us can think fast enough to respond at the highest level given the ambivalence of this society.

No one wants to return to the rigidity and hypocrisy of traditional shame when women were punished, the poor were punished, the rich were not, minorities were punished and the majority class was not. But the absence of new, equal, commonly held values and responses had left us in a moral void.

Many of our leaders do not seem to know that when people violate the commonly held values of our society, they do not deserve respect. If we continue to allow a Joey Buttafucco, a Marla Maples or a Michael Milkin to be invited to the “party” because they are “interesting,” then respect for a life of good values ceases to be a recognizable accomplishment.

When we elect dishonest individuals to office, or support radio hosts who have no regard for truth or civility, we tell children that those are our values. Rudeness and gratuitous violence should be shamed whether the source is television, movies, music or radio. I have to assume that even the worst of our “angry voices” would not want children to behave as they do.

We no longer know when to withdraw respect and we shy away from almost any form of social coercion even for children. This long preamble to a direct answer to your letter is to point out that when a society is moving too fast its citizens cannot always work out which values to apply, when or how to apply them. We get caught “in the moment” over and over again instead of understanding the long-term principles that are at stake.

One of those principles is to recognize who needs a helping hand and who needs a social slap. Your description of the newspaper incident merited your later response, “How can I help?” But how do any of us sort through all this social ambivalence quickly enough to avoid the old quick shame and replace it with something other than indifference?

My hope is that the new “character” courses beginning to show up in our schools (honesty, responsibility, kindness, punctuality, citizenship) will create a “new” common ground on what is right and wrong.

I also hope that the crisis of youth violence and the tragedy of Oklahoma City will push more adults to become mentors for young people, supporters of character education and willing to withdraw attention and respect from those who violate the values of a good society. We know what those values are. We must be willing to slow down long enough to remember their importance to our quality of life.

Thank you for caring about the man in the store and for writing. - Jennifer