Dear Editor
Last week’s letter to the editor by Jesse Laurentius deserves more than a quick read; it merits deep consideration and intellectual honesty. Jesse wrote that, had I stayed in Perryville, I could witness the courtesies and kindnesses of its citizens toward each other; that, should a local figure commit indecencies or engage in dishonesty, my fellow hometowners would effectively dismantle that person’s future attempts to corrupt the populace or its governance. I do agree with him and have brought up that same point to others.
Jesse holds that at the national level, however, Perry County conservatives allow for such behavior, even continuing their promotion and support for candidates who have been found guilty of a vast array of felonies, including fraud, sexual assault and statutory rape, and who have been caught red-handed taking bribes, lying to Congress, and using their office for personal and financial gain—caught red-handed yet avoiding indictment due to the corruption of the Department of Justice, which the current Oval Office inhabitant finds unremarkable.
How can I explain this profound and open display of hypocrisy? In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker describes emotional distance and moral action. Pinker notes that human moral instincts are influenced by proximity—people have different moral judgments depending on how “close” they feel to the action. Our morals involve sympathy and guilt, and these instincts are thrown into a dilemma as physical and emotional distance affects our responses.
For example, on our way home, we see a little girl on the side of the road in torn clothing, barefoot and dirty, with scratches and cuts red from recent injury. She’s crying. We become overwhelmed with sympathy and concern. We stop and involve ourselves with her rescue and her safety. We wouldn’t hesitate to pay out of our own pocket for her first aid, food, new clothes and shoes. Yet that same little girl exists in the same plight in another country, maybe one war-torn by our very own government, and though given the option of sending a few dollars her way through some international aid program, we decline. Some of us even continue to support that violence in the name of patriotism.
As civilization advances, we create more emotional distance from brutality. Our feelings of guilt and our moral scruples diminish as our distance from the act increases. This creates a potential conflict between our intuitive and emotional moral reactions and our sense of self-identity, in which we have convinced ourselves that we treat all lives as equally valuable. In truth, we do not.
Does that give us the right or privilege to dismiss our responsibility to our country, to its citizenry, to our rule of law, to our Constitution? Such appeasement is a display of intellectual dishonesty. Some will try to justify their actions with whataboutism, which simply deflects accountability and shifts the focus.
No, there has to be another red line beyond the county line. I do hope conservatives draw one soon.
Paul Flentge, Former Perryville resident / subscriber
