Being decent

Nine years ago, liberals like myself were aghast and outraged as Republican prosecutors charged President Bill Clinton with perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky investigation by Kenneth Star. "There was no crime that took place," we argued. "There should have been no investigation in the first place."

"No," conservatives argued. "It doesn't matter if there was a crime involved. What matters is that the President lied under oath, crime or not."

Nine years later, those same liberals all argue that Lewis Libby should go down for the same crime, and conservatives argue for a pardon.

All's fair in love and war, you think? Not really, I don't think. Just the same old bullshit.

What we need to learn to do, all of us, is to do the decent thing. And stop playing games with politics and prosecutions and one another with some self-righteous sense that any of us have all the answers. We don't. It doesn't matter what party or what ideology or what law we operate under.

None of us have all the answers.

Which is exactly why we need to be more decent to one another, not tougher and more mean-spirited.

None of us embody that elusive perfection that we so wish that we embodied, but cannot possibly be, no matter how tough we are with one another.

We've all been kind of pricks to one another, is the truth. Not just for the last 6 years. But since the dawn of humanity. And the only way forward is to leave that tragic legacy behind.

The only way forward is to be more decent.

Everything else is us deceiving ourselves and one another. The consequence of a long legacy of forcing and repressing ourselves and one another to pretend to be better than we really are.

But if we can learn to embrace our inner pricks, and be more decent with ourselves and one another, we can move forward.

And that is the only true path of progress.

Love,
Ben