Opinion: Character is destiny

Some of my favorite homilies are: You cannot cheat an honest man; honor is the gift a man gives to himself; character is what you are in the dark.

All of these axioms speak to a basic truth about the influence motives have on actions. If we employ foul means to achieve fair ends, whatever we do will be tainted.

Who we really are is revealed in how we behave when we are angry or desperate. Under duress, the mask of civility sloughs off and the true face emerges.

We now face a set of simultaneous crises more urgent than any we've encountered since 1945. At home and abroad, predators circle voraciously, hungering to consume everything we value.

We cannot rely solely on our leaders and institutions to perpetuate liberty; each citizen has a personal responsibility to serve the public good. Our survival is up to us!

We must, each in our own way, strive to be worthy of our liberty. When Free People in the past ceded power to demagogues who promised an effortless ease and security, they were soon enslaved. Winston Churchill understood. Real freedom demands our willingness to spend blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

With this in mind, look at those who engage in public discourse. Do they live up to their own values? Do they practice their own ideals? Are they honorable, decent and forthright?

Too many of our commentators and leaders make exceptions for themselves and their allies. They self-righteously lambaste their opponents while self-indulgently excusing themselves for failing to live up to the same high standards.

Locally, members of my beloved KCRCC seem to have flirted with a version of Rush Limbaugh's 2008 "Operation Chaos;" attempting to infiltrate and skew their political opponents' primary elections.

Limbaugh, a man whom I greatly admired, in this case encouraged Republicans to vote in Democrat Primaries for Obama and against Hillary Clinton. As a Conservative, I see this as a disastrous mistake for the nation. It is also just sleazy.

Politics is a dirty game — because otherwise upstanding citizens see it as an exception to the normal rules that should guide conduct in a civil society.

Conversely Christie Wood, the woman who is Todd Banducci's chief opponent on the NIC Board, is also the leader of the "independent entity” which called the College's accreditation into question. Her supporters ignore this inherent conflict-of-interest, which gives credence to the notion that this conflict is more of a personal vendetta than a principled disagreement over policy.

Nationally, Progressives, who once proudly declared that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, call for those who question a rush to war in the Ukraine to be arrested as traitors. This resembles their previous inconsistency in insisting that months of Antifa and BLM riots were "mostly peaceful" when compared with their characterization of the three-hour 1/6/21 riot as an "insurrection" worse than Pearl Harbor.

Tribalism is a poor substitute for truth. Hypocrisy always reveals a liar. Unless we all demand genuine integrity from our own side, even when it costs us, we do not have the moral authority to lead or to succeed. As Heraclitus once wrote, "Character is destiny!"

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com