It's You and Me and Decency

They keep saying it's human nature to be cruel. It's a survival skill. No. Not nearly as much as decency.

The moment Boston attorney Joseph Welch memorably confronted Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in June 1954: ""Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Why is it so hard to talk about what it means to be decent? Or to admit that we’re decent people willing to fight for, okay, decency? We talk about kindness, we show it, we treat it as a thing that moves us now and then, but we shy away from calling ourselves ‘decent’. Why? Maybe because it suggests a permanent mindset. An obligation. A burden. We’ve become so humbled, so aware of our own shortcomings, the word ‘decent’ feels somehow exalted. As if we could never live up to it.

We’re going to have to get over that.

We’ve spent years now, long before Donald Trump, talking about what a bunch of cruel bastards there are out there. We’ve hung onto their every cruel word, we’ve ranted against their every cruel act, we’ve shaken our heads at how much they get away with. Yet we’ve never demanded decency from them. Why not? We demand it of ourselves, in the quiet when nobody’s looking, when we know it’s what we need in order to live with ourselves.

All the time.

But never from them.

We can’t survive in a country that is more cruel than decent. We’ve seen countries around the world crumble because of sustained outright cruelty and we’ve wondered how an entire country could succumb to the cruelest of the cruel. Where were the decent people?

Now we’re seeing it firsthand right here in the United States—the decent people may soon be outnumbered by the cruel. We see it in the courts, the media, the elected ‘public servants’, the school boards, the corporations, even in churches—the only qualification is their willingness to hurt innocent people in order to gain enough power to keep hurting innocent people.

And who are the innocents? They’re those people who mostly prefer not to be cruel. Those people who just want to live their lives in ways that don’t crush them, in ways that find them love and give them hope.

They’re us. We’re the decent people.

We talk about our goodness in abstract terms, mainly in contrast to all of that cruelty, but we don’t demand goodness. We expect it, We hope for it, we wish for it, but we don’t demand it.

We don’t create barriers for the cruel, we don’t punish them unless their behavior is criminal—and even then they often get away with it. We don’t even pretend we have the upper hand. We accept that they exist, we accept that they’re allowed to live side by side among us without fear of retribution or even inconvenience, and in doing that it shouldn’t come as any surprise that they’re going to keep on doing what they do.

They’re bullies and they’re proud of it. They gain their strength by laughing at the things we let them get away with.

When a judge who claims to have complete control over his courtroom tells Donald Trump to stop talking or he’ll throw him out, and Donald says “I would love it”, and the judge says, “I know you would”, and doesn’t throw him out—doesn’t, even after several warnings, cite him with contempt and send him to the hoosegow—the bully wins. He goes on to brag about his bullying. And his people take note.

If that judge had seen decency not just as a virtue but as a necessity, Donald Trump would not have won that skirmish. He would have had to pay, just as any ordinary citizen would, for not obeying the rules of the court.

There are so many instances of outright cruelty these days it’s impossible to cite them all. In Texas alone, Gov. Greg Abbott uses cruelty as a weapon beyond anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes from a government official:

He signs onto using hidden razor wire in the Rio Grande to keep asylum seekers from crossing. Many are sliced and the river flows red. That is the goal.

He fills buses full of asylum seekers and sends them to cold weather states without proper outdoor clothing and has the drivers dump them in ‘sanctuary cities’ without alerting officials that they’re on their way. They shiver out in the cold for hours, waiting to be discovered and rescued. Their suffering feels to Abbott like a win.

He orders his own border patrol to destroy hidden food caches and bust up bottles of water so asylum seekers will come close to starving or dying of thirst out in the searing desert. A ‘deterrent’, he calls it.

He orders his own National Guard to stop any federal National Guardsmen from rescuing drowning families in plain sight. He pits his state against the union.

He is evil personified and yet he has no fear of punishment. In his own state he is all-powerful, his popularity a given. There are no signs he can or will be stopped.

As you read this, you’ll come up with instances on your own. Draconian abortion laws. LGBTQ tormentors. Accepted physical and sexual abuse. Crooked providers. Assault weapons on our streets. Threats both physical and existential. Those cruelties that matter to you and me that won’t go away. Yet they must. At some point they must.

“Don’t be cruel” won’t cut it anymore, if it ever did. Begging is a sign of weakness. They’ll only understand consequences.

Decent societies live by basic rules and fair laws. We need to not back down when we’re told the cruel have rights, too.

Why should the cruel have rights they haven’t earned and don’t deserve? Give one good reason—without bringing in ‘free speech’ or the First Amendment. They’re nonsensical excuses for defending cruelty. There is no defense for cruelty.

“Well, we have to be fair…” Since when are the cruel fair? What’s not fair about demanding that the cruel stop being cruel? Are we afraid we’re going to hurt their feelings?

Are we afraid they’ll come after us if we get them riled up? I’m more afraid of what they’ll do to the rest of you if we don’t.

Who gets to decide what is or isn’t cruel? Well, okay, how about not the cruel themselves? How about we stop letting them decide how far their cruelty can go?

This is where decency comes in. Decency needs the upper hand. Without it we lose all sense of who we are. If we think of ourselves as decent, then we goddamn well should think decent is the way to be. ‘Cruel’ is not. We’ve tolerated cruelty long enough.

Tolerance is a virtue, but only when it benefits the decent. Never when it benefits the cruel. We’ve seen what happens when we tolerate them. They’ll lie, they’ll cheat, they’ll steal, they’ll try to ruin us, and they’ll insist it’s the way it’s supposed to be. Our tacit if reluctant silence energizes them. We’re their victims now. It doesn’t matter that we’re decent; we’re still their victims.

Decency can’t take a back seat to cruelty. It’s not how healthy societies operate. We have to win, and we will. But first we have to appreciate and celebrate who we are. We aren’t perfect, we aren’t even always good, but we aren’t cruel. We aren’t them.

We have to take sides, and this is the year we’re going to have to mean it. I know which side I’m on. I’ve always known. I’m on the side of decency.

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