The Angels Have Left the Building

Missing points on the moral compass.

Lincoln, in his inaugural speech in 1861, called them the better angels of our nature. Where are they now? Flown the coop, I think.

This is what comes into my head when I look up from my work dividing dahlias and watch the rain drops sugarcoat the clear plastic roof of the hoop house.

Lately I’ve been wondering what ever happened to the concept of a moral compass. It seems many people don’t have one at all anymore. And then there’s a whole group of folks who have one with the needle apparently stuck pointing south.

A part of me feels a bit duped and very naïve. How I got all the way to age 62 thinking people are basically good – or more precisely, that most people are mostly good – I don’t know.

Now I see that I may have misjudged the situation. There are many people who don’t give a rat’s ass about being a good person. In fact, there are rats who would make better company than some humans. Or as John Prine would say, some humans ain’t human. Only the problem is, they are! Humans with seriously compromised owner’s manuals.

We all have evil in us, it’s true – bad things we do, we know not why, as St. Paul writes in Romans. But we don’t all light a match and burn the house of humility and kindness and compassion down to the ground.

Or worship power and greed to the extent that we relinquish the ideas of community and symbiosis altogether. Imagine if nature did that? We’d be sunk.

The temperature is dropping in here; I’m cold and my fingers fumble the pruners.