Principles into Action

by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given August 4, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

It is no surprise that some of the most read parts of any newspaper are the advice columns. Just a week ago, the last column from Ann Landers appeared in the newspaper. Eppie Lederer, the real Ann Landers, died on June 22 at age 83. The columns she wrote before her death have been running for the past couple months and they have now ended. I will miss reading her column.

She gave advice on how mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law should be together. 

She gave advice on how children should be raised.

She gave advice on how you should behave in an airplane.

She reprinted pithy quotations on how to live your life.

The issues she wrote about usually seemed pretty routine, but for people dealing with those issues, they were anything but routine. They were things that manage to consume a lot of energy in our lives. I think what I enjoyed most about her columns was her ability to speak clearly and succinctly. And she was not one to pull her punches. More often then not it was telling the writer that they were all wet and needed to get a life. If people wrote her looking for an excuse to do something wrong, she did not usually give them permission.

Randy Cohen writes another advice column entitled “The Ethicist,” which runs in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Like Ann Landers, he handles the range of issues, but from the perspective of ethics. The questions he fields range from, “is it okay to stay at a more expensive hotel than my co-worker while on company business?” to “is it okay to buy clothes, wear them for have a family photo shot, and then return them?” The short answer he gives to the first question, by the way, is yes. The answer to the second question is no.

Cohen says that the most common questions he is asked come down to “Do you tell?” They involve the need to report the infidelity of a friend’s spouse, the kickbacks extorted by a co-worker, the shoplifting of a granny in a grocery store. He writes that in many of these situations, there is a balance between the need to mind one’s own business and the need to not ignore wrongdoing. While some things are against the law, there are other things that just come down to the decision. And often we have double standards. While we might hold up the whistleblowers, exposing something corrupt, we also don’t at all like the squealer.

He says that a lot of people write him looking for a way to rationalize what they are doing. They want to do something, and probably know it is wrong, but want permission to do it anyway, or, as Cohen says, people not only want his permission but they want the permission of the New York Times. I guess that does carry a good deal of weight.

Most of us, I think, basically want to be good. We want to do the right thing by others. We want to get along in the world and live happy lives. As we try to do this, it is no wonder that we seek out the advice of others, or the advice of the larger culture. Making those decisions is not always easy.

Each one of us has a set of ethics that we have developed and that we live by. We may be able to articulate those ethics in words, but most often they happen through our deeds. Ethics are grounded in the values we hold. They are influenced by our families, by our faith tradition, by mentors and teachers, by the community we live in. Of course what we say our ethics are and what we actually do can be two very different things. Living out our ethics—walking our talk—may not always be as easy as stating what it is we intend for them to be.

And we can’t always know what the consequences of our actions will be. As an aside, I recommend the current film “13 Conversations about One Thing.” It is a film about a group of people whose lives intersect in one way or another. It very much reminds us that one action is connected to another and we don’t always know where our actions will lead.  In most of the stories in the film, it is clear that our actions do come round in one way or another.

Part of what guides us through life are the rules that we have come to know through faith traditions, through our cultures, through the law. Many of the rules we have tell us what not to do more than they tell us what to do. It is true that the golden rule tells us to treat others as we would have them treat us. That is good advice—and it is not always so easy to put it into practice. We sometimes have competing values that we are trying to make sense of in our lives. If we do one thing, we may or may not be able to do something else.

Most of the time I think it is pretty clear what we should or shouldn’t do in a situation. I’m impressed when people come to me as their minister wanting guidance that more often than not they know what they should do. Kind of like the advice columns, I get a sense that people come to me asking for permission to do something.

It is no surprise we want to get the perspective of someone else as we struggle with an issue. We live in demanding times. We live in fast-changing times. In fact, it seems that the one thing we can count on these days is that things will change, and that often they will change rapidly.

We live in times when we are bombarded with information. We get it from all kinds of sources—from the Internet, from cell phones, from TV, from magazines and newspapers, from billboards, from all kinds of places. I’m told that before too long we’ll hear advertising as we walk in front of a particular product at the grocery store. And all of this proves to be a mixed blessing. We can be connected on-line all the time. But that can also mean that we are connected to work all the time and really can’t get away. I notice for myself when I move at a little slower pace during the summer and don’t have as much information coming my way that I almost go through some withdrawal. I don’t quite know what to do when I don’t have to get to the next thing right in the next minute.

So it is in this context that we face ethical decisions. Most of the time they aren’t life-and-death situations as much as they are the situations about living life with integrity. Living life fully and seeing that we give what we need to the priorities in life—those are not easy goals. They are seeing that the many values we want to uphold are kept.

Often I think we wrestle with ethical questions when we know they will come with a cost. It is not so easy when we know that doing what we should do will mean that we go against the grain, or simply not being all that popular or maybe putting something more at risk. But sometimes we have to make those decisions to live with integrity.

In 1993, journalist Ray Suarez found himself in a quandary—what he would call the biggest conflict in his professional life. Suarez discovered a love of writing in high school and worked his way up the professional ladder by reporting for radio and television here and abroad. Beginning in the mid-80s he worked at the NBC affiliate in Chicago and it was here where he found himself in a dilemma. These are his words:

“When video games first started to become hot, a family sued the major makers of video games in the United States for some unbelievable amount of money… because their kids would get seizures. And about half-way into the reporting of the story, I realized that we were talking about one-tenth of one one-hundredth of one one-thousandth of the kids who play video games. But TV has a tendency to play everything like, ‘Here’s a possible danger of video games.’

“And I called in, sort of to telegraph my concerns ahead, sort of in advance for this fight that I knew we were going to have, about the way we were going to play this story. And I said… it’s irresponsible to give people the idea that video games are dangerous, or, in the way that television usually does, it teases ‘could be dangerous’ to your family, making no guarantees but getting you to salivate and listen. I said, we’re talking about a tiny number of American children, a tiny number. And once you find out that your kids have this, which you may have already known before they ever sat down to play one video game, because all kinds of computer and TV monitors shoot impulses to the eye at this number of times per second… if they play anyway, and have seizures, well whose fault is that? We’re talking about a story that we’re going to play as a hot, big story, that isn’t a story. Because we tell stories that have an impact with large numbers of people, so what we’re trying to do is just cross our fingers, put them behind our back, and we’ll tell them at the end, oh, and by the way, our kids probably are okay. I said, I don’t want to do that. I think it’s cheap, I think it’s not true, I think even, no matter how many times we couch it and qualify it, it will leave an untrue residue in the minds of people who watch the story. So what are we really doing? We’re just winding people up. We’re not telling them good information.”

In summing up the battle with the executive of the station: “ And that fight went on for a long time, in TV terms, like an hour or an hour an a half. I lost.”

He said, “There’s only so much in the way of show-boaty integrity you can afford to have, because if you have a contract and the contract says certain things, and one of the things is, you have to say what you are told.”

Not long after this Suarez found himself making active plans to get out of the news business. This was not the first such issue he had encountered and he knew it would not be the last. He found his way to National Public Radio, and that proved to be a good fit for him. He was the host of the radio program “Talk of the Nation” on NPR for six years before he became a senior correspondent for the News-Hour on PBS. He has been much honored, and considered an innovator in his profession. He was able to stay in the business but not everyone is able to do that.

Journalism, increasingly controlled by huge media corporations that are increasingly focused on the bottom line is not the only profession going through enormous changes in this time in history. I’m amazed at some of the things that now seem to be common in journalism, from the promotion of entertainment in the actual newscast to the loss of local control of newsrooms. The profession is going through tremendous changes and that dramatically impacts the quality of the product and also the people producing that product.

But journalism is certainly not the only place where such changes have happened. In many areas, things have changed dramatically. When I talk to nurses and doctors they say how much their profession has changed and how hard it can be these day to actually spend much time with patients. To actually spend time doing the things that I expect brought them into the profession in the first place. There are more and more forms to fill out, more people looking over your shoulder questioning every procedure. There is the rush to move a patient though as quickly as possible, so the patients that are in the hospital are sicker, and therefore need more attention.

I heard an interview last week with some registered nurses. They were asked how the profession has changed. One of the most disturbing things they reported is that they have a buddy system set up for when they themselves go into hospitals. They make sure that they are never left alone and that their buddy will be able to advocate for them.

For those of you who might be going into the hospital next week for surgery, I should quickly add that the nurses talked about how dedicated people are and how much care they are actually able to give. Nonetheless, it was disturbing thing to hear about this.

For people in business, it may be that you are increasingly asked to cut corners. If you are investing money for someone and the next guy is doing it and getting better returns—no matter what some of the practices might have been in order to get those returns—there is pressure on you to do the same. In light of the scandals rocking the corporate world, that person who follows the rules may well be in a much better position than he was a few weeks ago, but the pressure is still there.

For people in the teaching profession, you are asked to prepare students for more and more tests, there are more and more students in the classroom and higher expectations. Actually getting down to teaching and being with students is very difficult.

When I hear the stories of people’s lives, I know that these kinds of struggles are very difficult. And there are not easy answers most of the time. For Ray Suarez, he found his niche. But if you have gone into debt to prepare for a certain field, if you are supporting a family and there is not another realistic prospect for good pay. If you have invested your time in something and simply don’t want to leave it, there may be no good answers.

And of course such issues don’t just happen in the workplace. For parents, how do you balance the needs of family and work? For older people, how do you balance the cost of health care with what you hope to leave your loved ones one day? And for all of us, we need to ask: Where do we buy our food and how much do we pay? Where do we invest money if we have money to invest? Life is full of questions and challenges and we are asked to figure out what we’re going to do.

It is important to see how we are all players in systems. We pay taxes that support schools, we elect officials that set budget priorities. We vote on measures that affect all kinds of public institutions. We are consumers of the media and of the health care system. Knowing where we have power and knowing that in every choice we make there are ethical implications, that is probably how we can most live out our lives with a sense of integrity. It comes down to knowing where it is we stand and the principles we stand upon. It comes with having the courage to do what we know is right, even if it might not be popular or quite as comfortable. It comes down to paying attention to our conscience and what it is telling us to do.

We do make a difference and we can use our power to make change happen.

You may have heard the story of the publication of Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. As you might gather from the title, the book is not particularly kind to some of our top government leaders in its assessment of what is wrong with the country and who is responsible for it. Moore became famous some years ago with his documentary Roger and Me, which is about how autoworkers were affected by all the changes in the automotive industry.

The book was scheduled to be released on September 12 of last year. When the events of September 11 happened, the book, along with all kinds of other things, was put on hold. Moore tells the story of talking with his editor some weeks later only to be told that they couldn’t release the book right then. The weeks went by and he was told that in fact the book couldn’t be released in its present form—that he was going to have to edit it. And not just edit it a little, but rewrite most of the book. Among other things, he was told that he couldn’t criticize President Bush. He was told that in the political climate since September 11 he just couldn’t do that. From what I have heard about the book, he does quite a bit of that. Moore refused to change the book and eventually the publisher told him that the book was not going to be released at all—it was going to be pulped. Moore notes that this was a new usage of the word pulp for him. Moore offered to distribute the book himself, but the publishing company would not let him do this.

A day or two after being told this news, it so happened that Moore was speaking to a group of librarians—from New Jersey, I believe. He told them the story of the book being pulped and how upset he was about it.

Well, it turns out one of the things that librarians don’t take kindly to is book pulping—especially when the books haven’t even been read yet. As Moore tells the story, a couple days later he got a call from his publisher and the publisher asked, “What did you tell those librarians? Tell them we are going to publish your book. Please just get them off our backs.”

With the spread of e-mail, the librarians were able to do a great deal of communicating in a short time. The publishers did release the book—unrevised—and now it is in its 24^th printing.  This week it moved to the top of the bestseller list of the New York Times.

Moral of the story: don’t rile up a bunch of librarians from New Jersey.

We are faced with decisions every day of our lives. We are asked to be aware of our privilege in the world, we are asked to be aware of the power that comes with that privilege. We are asked to be open to new ideas and where those ideas might lead us. We are asked to be aware of the many choices we make, and to know where we can and where we can’t make a difference.

I have been carrying an image in my mind this past week. It comes from the remarkable story of the coal miners who were caught underground for several days in Pennsylvania last week. The story had a happy ending—they all survived. Of course they were asked just how they did that. They said they would circle around the miner who most needed warmth among them. They did this, one miner at a time, and in the end, all of them survived.

That seems like the apt image for what it is we are trying to do in life. Life in all of its complexity seems so simple at times. Perhaps that is a paradox that we live with. Ethics is not some static thing. It is, most basically, living with an awareness of the  necessity of interdependence and a willingness to do what that awareness calls us to do.

In this classroom of life we find ourselves in, we have to make for ourselves a life, a real life. And then we live that life. We make mistakes. We stumble and fall. We find teachers along the way. And in the end, hopefully, we know that we have truly been alive. Amen.

PRAYER

Great Spirit, be with us in all our struggles. Be with us in all the times of our lives. Help us to stay grounded in the wisdom we have inherited. Help us to have courage to live fully in our days. Through it all, may we know we are embraced and held by you. We ask this in the name of the good and the sacred. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Live in courage, live in wisdom, live in love, good people. Leave this day in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.