Have we given up on goodness?

Sometimes I think that when it becomes just too challenging to be "good," we revert to being "bad." That when doing "the right thing" gets really tough, we wallow in doing "the wrong thing."

That's what seems to have happened to our beloved nation, as well as throughout the world.

We–the USA–were, for years, proud to be the land where people could come when they had no other options. We celebrated any steps we took to overcome our legacy of institutional slavery and racism. We believed everyone deserved a fair shot at succeeding financially and socially. We counted on open and peaceful elections, and on our free, even if not always absolutely fair, press. Women felt, I believe, increasing power to determine their own destinies.

Courts could be counted on, at least some of the time, to side with the individual, particularly if their rights were being limited by practices and laws beyond their control. Our nation claimed to want to lead the world into new experiences of freedom and liberty.

We knew that compromise was essential to the survival of democracy, and treated our political adversaries with at least enough respect to give compromise a chance. We held that the minority always deserved to be heard and responded to, and that elected officials represented geographical areas inhabited by people of all kinds, not just their own partisans within that area.

We held that politeness and even grace should be the basis of almost any relationship.

In the last couple of decades or so many of us decided that all of this national "goodness" was too hard to pull off. It was not worth the effort. We began to doubt our own ability to be the nation we liked to say we were. Enough of us who had been trying to be that kind of citizen quit trying, which allowed those who never believed in such ideals anyway to step out of the shadows and into the light. Social media and the internet created breathing room for the worst of our doubts and fears, and continues to pump oxygen into them.

What will it take to restore our determination to be our best ethical selves in the the most just possible USA? What kind of leaders will successfully challenge us to go for "goodness" again?

Not those who shout and chastise and blame, or who refuse any compromise (except, when it serves their purposes, compromise with truth), or who lecture us as if we were ignorant. It will take quiet-spoken, thoughtful, and patient Americans who are willing to listen to all voices as well as to take responsibility for the decisions they finally make to get us to where we need to be, to where I honestly believe most of us truly want to be.