[Grovenet] What Value Honesty?

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

That's a legitimate question. 

Corruption and dishonesty is a fact of life throughout our society to the
highest levels of government. Sometimes it seems like we are all drowning in
a sea of crooks as they do everything imaginable to bankrupt the rest of us.


And, in spite of it all, not everyone accepts their crazy morality.
Misplaced valuables do end up in the "Lost and Found"; we'd just like to see
it happen more often. 

I've been reading an interesting autographical book by Clyde Rice(1). It won
the 1984 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Clyde tells of
living in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in the desperate years
of the great depression. Two catastrophes had befallen him in quick order as
he tried to provide for his family: his job on the ferryboats came to an
abrupt end with the completion of the Golden Gate bridge and an attempt to
build a business selling goat's milk was sabotaged when crooked dairy
farmers bribed corrupt county officials to ban the sale of anything but
cow's milk in the major markets. The failure cost him all of his savings. It
led him to flirt briefly with the idea of being dishonest and then to
reconcile his feelings about it. 

Clyde has this to say about the value of honesty:

"All I had to do was go to the county and join the relief and join the dole
and say, "take care of me." Millions did, and food and clothing and job
preference would be mine. But I was proud. I was proud of my father, I was
proud of his pride, as he was a upright man. I was essentially an upright
man; we were, in comparison to our contemporaries, much more honest and
dependable. As my father said, if you lean enough fence posts together they
can all stand up... We believed that if twenty percent of the citizenry were
honest, though it paid to be dishonest, the fabric of society built on trust
and plain honesty would stand. The trouble with honesty was that it held you
back in politics and worldly goods. But if certain men were not stalwart
enough to accept the losses incurred by straight dealing, the whole
government and interpersonal relationships would tumble. We accepted the
burden because we had to be a tent pole, to hold the tent up, and, as in
Plato's scheme, we were paid in esteem and self-esteem. And we were proud --
not overweening pride -- but a sense of an ill-paid job well done. That
being the case, I had to go on as I had been going."

As I read that I thought about the honest people I know. I'm blessed to know
many of them. And I thought about many who I've never met: soldiers who
serve in Iraq alongside the morally corrupt who the army now actively
recruits to keep up its quotas - people the army would never consider in the
past. I think about honest men who have spent years and years locked away in
our prison in Cuba. Surely those are not all crooks or terrorists. The
simple fact that our government will not allow their cases to be heard
publicly ensures that. 

With so many honest, upright people suffering at the hands of others, how
can we tolerate one dishonest person, one dishonest act, and accept their
dishonesty because it's too inconvenient, too complicated or too difficult
to bring them to justice? 

Ron D'Eau Claire

(1) A Heaven in the Eye by Clyde Rice, 1984, ISBN 0-380-69919-2