Government by What?

As I sit down to write this column, the United States Senate is about ready to vote on the two Articles of Impeachment presented by the House of Representatives against the President. By all accounts, the affirmative vote will fall short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict the President and remove him from office, and it is possible that not even a simple majority will vote to convict on one, and perhaps both, of the articles. This means that the issue which has, for the past year, held center stage in the theater of national politics will finally have been laid to rest.

Its grave, however, may well be unquiet. The issue of presidential impeachment has divided Americans like no issue since the Vietnam War, and the polarization could easily continue. Today’s Plain Dealer carried two articles: one assessing whether Ohio’s Senator Mike DeWine will pay for his high profile in the senatorial process; the second detailing a possible strategy of retaliation by the White House against Republican members of the House of Representatives, and especially against the House Managers of the impeachment. Meanwhile we, the people, find ourselves having to deal with feelings of outrage, disappointment, frustration, and a sense of lost opportunities. Many have had friendships lost or frayed by this sordid chapter in our national life.

What is manifestly clear is that we will continue to be governed, in the political sense, by fallible human beings who operate from mixed motives, have gaping holes in their moral armor, and who often seem blind to what is perfectly obvious to us. Whatever the Senate vote may bring of the much-celebrated “closure” there will be no change in the basic realities of human nature and political reality.

So what about us? How shall we govern ourselves in this imperfect world, so full of ambiguity and compromise?

That is a question much more important (in my view) than the issues which have occupied the Congress for the past year; much more important, even, than the question of Clinton’s fitness to remain in office.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the murder of his family and his own imprisonment in a Nazi death camp, has said that the last and most valuable human freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude, one’s internal response to whatever external situation one faced. The exercise of that freedom, indeed, is what he credits with saving his life, and it became the basis of a whole new school of psychotherapy which he formulated in the process of rebuilding his life and work after the war.

The essential question which confronts each of us, all the time, is simply this: “Will I be governed by what I admire, or by what I dislike?” It is a choice we make as spouses, as parents, as citizens, as members of any group, and as we look into the depths of our own being. And on the choice we make depend, I think, the happiness and fulfillment we experience in living. The people and situations life presents to us are almost always a mixture of good and bad, so we don’t get either unalloyed pleasure or unmitigated pain. We have to choose where our focus will be.

There is no question but that, in the short term, hatred is more powerful than love. It made Hitler’s job an easy one. It powered decades of Klan influence in the American South. It affected both sides in the Branch Davidian fiasco and the Ruby Ridge tragedy. It undoubtedly contributed to the recent shooting of an innocent man by New York City police officers. It fuels the standoff in Kosevo and imperils the Middle East peace process. And it will guarantee a sellout for Browns-Ravens games in the foreseeable future.

The Christian world began, yesterday, the observance of Lent; in many churches, Ash Wednesday involves a literal reminder that we all have our “black marks” and that we expect to share in the Easter victory only on the basis of God’s love for us.

Governing one’s self by what one admires means that, while we note both what is good and what is bad in any person or situation, we, like God, make our decisions on the basis of what is good.

This entry originally appeared in the Berea, Ohio, News-Sun on February 18, 1999