The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  Which is why, I think, justice is something we prefer to mete out rather than to receive. And why, I think, the groovy, loosey-goosey, super-chill vibe of karma is so appealing. It’s the universe, man. Not a bunch of harried and preoccupied strangers in a drab jury room trying to sort out big issues.

  But the universe has no appeals process. You can’t ask karma for a second chance. You can’t explain yourself to the cosmic balancing system and ask for a little wiggle room. You sleep late on a Saturday and Costco is going to be hell.

  What we’re all looking for—even as we devise more draconian and painful punishments for our fellow man—is a little mercy. Justice we’ve got. Justice comes in great floods and firestorms over Sodom and Gomorrah and fifteen-to-twenty with no parole. Justice—and even low-calorie karma—can seem awfully cruel, even when it’s about as fair and dispassionate as possible.

  It’s not hard, then, to see how the simple message of a Jewish carpenter in Nazareth became so popular. Jesus didn’t talk much about justice. He talked about mercy. He talked about forgiveness. As his followers see it, Jesus is the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals, Universal Circuit. And he’s a pretty lenient jurist.

  There are constellations of theology going on here, with tangles of writings and memoirs and lives of the saints spanning two thousand years of debate about God’s mercy tempered with his justice. But when you hear a gospel group sing “Jesus Dropped the Charges,” it all kind of clicks into place.

  “I was guilty,” they sing, “Of all the charges”:

  doomed and disgraced,

  but Jesus,

  with His special love,

  saved me by His grace;

  He pleaded

  And He pleaded

  He pleaded my case.

  Jesus dropped the charges,

  Jesus dropped the charges,

  At Calvary I heard Him say,

  At Calvary I heard Him say,

  At Calvary I heard Him say,

  case dismissed, case dismissed….

  It may be hokey, but it’s also a lot truer than most things we pretend to think about justice and fairness. We’re not really looking for balanced scales or blindness. Oh, yes, maybe that’s what we think is right for the other guy, but what we really want to hear—when we spend a night totaling up our transgressions and petty actions and lies large and small—is forgiveness. To hear “case dismissed.” To walk out of the courtroom of life a free man, touched not by justice but by mercy.

  To sleep as late as we like and glide though a near-empty Costco.

  CHAPTER 4

  Courage

  The Rise of “Shelter in Place” America

  Michael Graham

  IN 1965 CIVIL RIGHTS activist John Lewis helped lead six hundred marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, walking headlong into the violence of fire hoses, tear gas, and stick-wielding state police. Lewis was twenty-five at the time. He got his skull fractured for his trouble. Yet despite repeated attacks, arrests, and trips to jail, Lewis continued to lead civil rights protests across the South and was eventually elected to Congress from the once-segregated state of Georgia.

  That was then.

  In 2013 someone spray-painted the phrase “Knights Don’t Need No Ni**as” on the home of a mixed-race high school student in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. (The Knights were the mascot of the football team, for which the kid played.) There were no fire hoses. No dogs. Just a splash of spray paint. The response? The family immediately pulled their son out of the school. And then the school cancelled the entire remainder of the football season. Just cancelled it.

  Asked why he took such drastic action in the face of a single act of intimidation, the Lunenburg High principal responded, “I thought, ‘Would I bring my own kids to a game?’ And the answer is ‘No.’ Why? Because it wasn’t safe to play.” A suburban high school football game wasn’t … “safe”? What did he think was going to happen? That the Aryan Nation Air Force would drop KKK paratroopers onto the field?

  While heroic school officials waged a brave battle against “Mississippi Burning: Massachusetts Edition,” over on the West Coast another great American was calling on his inner Braveheart in an epic struggle to the death. With his house pet.

  In early 2014, Lee Palmer of Portland, Oregon, got upset when his cat, Lex, scratched his seven-month-old baby. He gave the twenty-pound Lex a good kick in its backside. The cat, according to Palmer, suddenly “went off over the edge.” It began running around the room, hissing and spitting. Palmer and his baby mama, Theresa Barker, grabbed the baby—and their dog—rushed into the nearby bedroom, and slammed the door. Every time they opened it, the ferocious feline greeted them with a growl.

  Being modern Americans, they did what comes naturally when confronted with terror. They called 911. Here follows—hand to God—the actual transcript of the call:

  PALMER: He’s very, very, very, very hostile…. He’s charging at us! He’s at our door…. Did you hear him scream?

  CAT: Raaaaaarrrr!

  “It’s easy to laugh,” Ms. Barker solemnly told reporters afterward. “When this happens to you, I assure you, you will do the same thing.” We have to laugh, lady. To keep from cringing. When you have a grown man afraid of his own housecat, you’ve moved beyond mere cowardice. When you have a suburban school official too scared to face Friday Night Lights, you’ve abandoned the very idea of courage. And so we have. The descendants of Sam Adams and Paul Revere, who ran to the sound of the guns so that they could face the most deadly army on the planet, have devolved into “shelter in place” Americans who cannot bear even the sight of a gun, much less the sound.

  It gets worse. In 2011 more than forty members of the Burlington, Massachusetts, police department—including a SWAT team and a crew flying a helicopter—rushed to the local mall because a woman reported seeing a man “with a short rifle” roaming the hall outside Banana Republic. The mall was quarantined. The nearby interstate was shut down. Hours later an employee at a nearby medical office who walked through the mall from the bus station every morning saw the news on TV. He started to wonder if the umbrella sticking out of his backpack that morning might have sparked the alarm.

  At first he dismissed the idea, because (a) it’s an umbrella, and (b) he had seen the usual security guards hanging out that morning and not one of them had approached him. But being a good citizen, he called the cops anyway and, sure enough….

  There was a time when, if a panicky granny started talking about seeing rifles in the food court, a security guard would have checked it out himself. Then—in the wildly unlikely event someone with a gun was planning target practice at Target—he would have called the cops. This would have been about the same time in our national history when the police, getting a report of an alleged gun sighting by a single, wobbly witness, would have sent a squad car to investigate. And again, if it had been the one-in-a-million “mall terror” moment, he would have called for backup. Instead, the old biddy made her report, the mall cops called the real cops, and the coppers responded by sending in a small army with tactical weapons and air support.

  Why didn’t common sense win the day? Because everyone involved was too scared. After the debacle had been sorted out, the security guards claimed that they considered it their job not to find the rumored rifle, but to run away from it. They called the cops and hid. And the Burlington police chief publicly praised them for doing just that—right before he defended his decision to spend tens of thousands of dollars and tie up the interstate over an umbrella. In fact, the chief went so far as to say, “I would hope that if the exact same thing happened tomorrow, they [the panicked witness and first responders] would do the same thing.”

  The moral of the story isn’t that this one police chief is ridiculous. It’s that his attitude is now our societal default: Any risk is seen as an unacceptable amount of risk.

  In the land of red, white, and blue, yellow is the new black.

  How did a nation born in rebel
lion become a place where we let the government tell us what size sodas to drink? Why are we willing to suffer the human cattle call of airport security, with grown men sullenly standing in their stocking feet, wingtips in hand, while the lady in front of them gets groped by handsy TSA agents?

  It’s not because we live in a more dangerous world than our eighteenth-century ancestors did. Far from it. Setting aside the horror of 9/11, we Americans have never been safer, healthier, or more secure. Violent crime rates have collapsed. In a nation with more than 300 million people, we average just over one hundred abductions by strangers each year. The death rate for car accidents is way down. Even our fireworks—the last bastion of socially sanctioned physical recklessness—are safer. Seriously. More people were killed in 2009 by vending machines falling on them than were sent to their maker by recreational explosives.

  But watch the news—or talk to your neighbors—and you’ll see a society living as though mortal danger lurks around every well-lit corner. We have to show ID in order to enter worksites that have never been safer. We keep our kids off sidewalks and out of parks that have never been more secure. As a nation, the world’s greatest military and economic superpower peeks out across the horizon like an elderly lady behind her lace curtains, nervously eying the neighborhood teens smoking by the lamppost.

  What’s going on is that Americans have embraced a cowardly moral calculus: Do something, and if it doesn’t work out you’ll get blamed. Do nothing, and maybe no one will notice. Every few months there’s a story about someone in distress—a lost child, a sick senior citizen, a hit-and-run victim lying in the street—and how long it took for a Samaritan to stop and help. “I wanted to stop but I was afraid.” “What if I got sued?” “What if I got in trouble?”

  Americans in past generations dealt with these same worries, too, whenever they rushed to the aid of strangers or stepped in to defend a woman’s honor. But they were also haunted by other questions—namely, “What would people say if they found out I did nothing?”

  Back then, the fears competing against our courage were counterbalanced by the power of shame. Not anymore. Because when everyone shelters in place, then no one has to feel guilty about it.

  Everything about the phrase “shelter in place” irks my inner American. I hate the bogus sense of action being slapped onto this pseudo-gerund. “Shelter” is a noun, and trying to turn it into a verb, like “efforting” and “journaling” is a con on the body politic.

  No one said “shelter in place” when I was growing up. So far as I can tell, the first usage in the media dates back to 1987, when it was used to describe the safety protocol for a chemical plant malfunction. In fact, the term was almost entirely confined to that one area—industrial chemical disasters—throughout the whole of the 1990s.

  No, I never encountered this icon of cultural cravenness—which is now standard operating procedure—until the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In the aftermath—which included a shootout with the terrorist Tsarnaev brothers on the streets of Cambridge—local cops launched a manhunt for the younger brother, Dzhokhar. The teen, injured but on the run, was a terrorist, for sure. But he wasn’t a Tom Clancy—style supervillain. He was an evil nineteen-year-old idiot who needed to get rounded up by the posse. Yet as the cops, the feds, and every agent of the government short of SEAL Team Six searched for him, the governor gave the order for residents of the greater metropolitan Boston area—all four million of us, spread out over fourteen hundred square miles—to “shelter in place.” Stay home from work, skip school, hit pause on your daily lives. All because of the fear aroused by one wounded, backpack-toting teenager.

  And we—the residents of the cradle of the revolution—complied. The Minutemen shot. We “sheltered.”

  The shelter impulse starts early. Parents buy their toddlers “Thudguards”—helmets they’re supposed to wear while learning how to walk. We’re not talking about biking or skateboarding—this is protection from the dangers of toddling. Once the citizen-infant has mastered the hazards of bipedalism, we promptly order them to stop: No walking to the park, or to the corner store, or to a friend’s house. Because it’s a dangerous world out there.

  We don’t even let our kids walk to school. In the 1960s, about half of American schoolchildren were walkers. Today the number is around 10 percent. And the folks who do let their kids walk? May God have mercy on their souls. In 2009, a Mississippi mom named Lori Pierce let her ten-year-old walk to soccer practice, about a mile from their home. “Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911,” the New York Times reported. “A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment.” (Take a moment to appreciate that a boy walking to soccer practice in Mississippi was so scandalous that it made the New York Times.)

  Once the kid gets to school, it’s not a lot better. Surely you’ve heard about “zero-tolerance” policies: The six-year-old boy in Colorado kicked out of school for violating the “sexual harassment” policy? (He kissed a little girl.) The elementary-school student in Arkansas taken into police custody for pointing a chicken nugget at a teacher and saying, “Pow pow”? It’s evident to anyone paying attention that zero tolerance equals 100 percent stupidity. But you have to understand that zero-tolerance rules aren’t about protecting kids. They exist to protect the adults who are too cowardly to make judgments.

  Consider: Two kids bring a knife to school. One is a hood wannabe with a serious knife; the other is an honor student with a pseudo-spork to cut her lunchtime apple. In a culture with a dollop of courage, one student would be in serious trouble and the other would either be ignored or gently reminded to leave her spork home next time. And then, when parents showed up at school demanding to know why Sluggo was treated differently than little Sally, the administrator would explain that there are real and material differences between the cases, and by the by, they might want to lock it down at home before Sluggo is initiated into MS-13.

  But that would involve courage. So instead we teach our kids that there’s no difference between totin’ a gat and biting a toaster strudel into an L-shape that vaguely resembles a gun. (Yes, a kid was really punished for making a “Pop-Tart pistol.” I told you we’re scared to even look at guns.)

  We continue this adversity avoidance through high school and often into college. Then we wonder why “adult” college grads flock home to Mom and Dad to sleep under their Transformers bedspread and sign up for health care on their parents’ insurance.

  Courage—the notion that resolve in the face of difficulties and strife is a good thing—has withered before our eyes. And it’s dying because we have smothered its food source: adversity. There can be no courage without fear. There can be no bravery without danger. This is the nonnegotiable proposition every person and society face. And as a nation, America looked at this deal and said—We’ll take it! If living in a land without risk means a culture without courage, we have no problem with that.

  Except that there is a problem. Adversity cannot be banned. It falls from the skies in hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms. It pounds greedily on our door when it thinks we’re unprepared and the police are unavailable. It flies in on airplanes, with evil plans and box cutters. It is always—always—floating about, ready to interrupt normal life at a moment’s notice.

  Affluent suburbanites may believe courage is passé, that they’ve achieved real security by living in good neighborhoods and installing home security systems. They think they have barricaded their lives forcefully enough to keep danger forever at bay. Most of the time, they’re right—but every once in a while they’re wrong. Anyone who dies fat, happy, and unafraid in their beds without ever having faced a moment of danger has done so not through careful planning but sheer, dumb luck.

  Most of us won’t be that lucky. More importantly, most of our children
won’t either. One day, they will turn and find danger staring them in the face. And whether it’s the darkness of human nature or the mindless violence of Mother Nature, they’re going to need courage to bear it.

  Will they have that strength? Will they even understand the danger when it finds them, or will they desperately pound the screens of their iPhone demanding “Where’s the app for this?”

  America isn’t, won’t be, and shouldn’t be Sparta. We don’t need parents abandoning middle schoolers in the wilderness with a pocketknife and a compass and saying, “If you’re not home by Friday we’re renting out your room.” But we should give up the notion that danger and discomfort are, in and of themselves, bad things—signs that someone has done something wrong, that some policy must be changed … that danger can, through careful planning and lots of bureaucracy, be eliminated. This notion couldn’t be more wrong.

  If you’re a parent, and you’re sending away to college kids who’ve never been asked to do a task that was too hard, or been given a responsibility they didn’t believe they could bear, or have never been asked to suffer a single moment for the sake of another—you haven’t succeeded. You’ve failed.

  Courage is the essential virtue. What good is intelligence, if you’re not strong enough to stand up for good ideas? What’s the point of moral understanding if you lack the guts to do the right thing? What help is love if you don’t have the heart to defend those precious to you? Without courage, then prudence, wisdom, charity—every virtue on the list—all come to naught.