Home ground in Salt Lake City. I feel like I am wearing ruby slippers. There is comfort in one's own town. History shared. We know who we are and who we are not. With age comes affection for what once caused pain. Eventually, we make peace with where we are raised. Or at least we try. History trumps wounds, not because time heals, but because stories have a longer memory than we do.
Today I have a live interview with Doug Wright on KSL radio, a Mormon-owned media station of tremendous influence in the interior West. I adore him. He is fair. We may disagree on some issues, but I love how he is so open and honest with his listeners. This is a talk show, largely conservative, largely local, but it is a program where people engage respectfully.
Doug asks me about the Florida situation. He knows me first as the naturalist-in-residence from the Utah Museum of Natural History. As we speak, Vice-President Dick Cheney is speaking at Florida Gulf Coast University. I will learn later from faculty on campus that there were protests from the students outside the venue where he was speaking. Faculty, too. Students were allowed to enter without a republican voter registration card, so were democrats. Not enough republicans came.
We talk about how one goes about listening. Doug should know. This is his livelihood. He says it is about one word: respect. He invites me to read some excerpts from "The Open Space of Democracy." I read a paragraph, "The human heart is the first home of democracy..." For me, it is all about relationships.
In Thomas Merton's words, "...it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."
Brooke and his sister, Becky and I meet for lunch up at her house. We discuss the opportunities each of us has daily to be brave. It is rarely on a large scale, but rather in the small decisions we are faced with hour by hour. Choices. A personal commitment to democracy resides in our choices. Brooke shares some ideas he and his colleagues have been discussing at Bainbridge Graduate Institute from the Center for Ethical Leadership.
In any ethical dilemma, four steps are involved in "value-based decision-making:"
1. Moral Awareness
2. Moral Reasoning
3. Moral Choosing
4. Moral Action
To become aware of the issues at hand, to recognize and think through how values may be colliding; to be creative in alternative solutions; and to then act with courage to "put your choice in action."
Brooke argues that action is the most difficult aspect of decision-making to achieve. Becky believes the most important step toward an ethical decision is, first, to become aware of the problem at hand. I believe in the power of imagination to carry us into new terrain; it is why the arts are so powerful in creating social change.
I think of Denise Levertov's lines from her poem, "A Speech for Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980:
