Although my mother died 35 years ago, her oft-repeated advice about how to be a “good boy” and a credit to my family has lived on in the big mouth of this guy who sits on my right shoulder and screams insults at me when I step out of line.
Mom never screamed at me, although my two sisters often say she should have. Yet, to say she was usually quiet about my shortcomings is a bit of a stretch.
Her instructions were a compilation of the moral wisdom of the age. They were maxims about character and honesty gleaned from the Bible, Benjamin Franklin, William Shakespeare, the Ladies’ Home Journal and Confucius — a la fortune cookies.
They included:
- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
- If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
- Honesty is its own reward.
- Your word is your bond.
- If you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing at all.
- If all your friends jump off a cliff, that doesn’t make it OK for you to follow.
She had others, but these are the main ones she left for the guy on my shoulder to scream about. In addition, she offered me a few suggestions on how I might measure my success in living up to her instructions:
- Measure the strength of your character by counting the number of people with no character at all who dislike you.
- If something feels wrong, it probably is.
- If you were arrested for being a good person, would the jury have enough evidence to convict you?
- Who have you helped today without any expectation of reward?
When I came home from school, she rarely, if ever, pounded on me about my test scores, nor did she stand on the sidelines criticizing as all those Little League baseballs fell through my glove out in right field.
The mantra she passed on to the pest on my shoulder was not about beating the competition, being first in line or jumping through the hoops the world sets up to measure “success.” Her repetitious chant was about basic values of love, compassion, fairness, justice, forgiveness and honesty.
Since I am not consistently good at being an example of most of those values, the screaming from my shoulder hasn’t been pleasant or easy to accept. At times, I even have to take a break and embrace for a while the opposing view of more modern philosophers who say guilt is not productive and the route to happiness is just to “accept who you are.”
At that point, the guy on my shoulder really howls. He knows I would have spent a great deal of my life in a moral ditch (or maybe jail), if I had not been forced to consume a healthy helping of preemptive guilt.
My mom wasn’t perfect. (Well, actually she was, but I said that to make you think I am more objective about her than I am. Now I feel guilty about lying to keep down your skepticism.) Still, as I look around the world today, I wonder whether we all don’t need a bit more well-deserved guilt and a bit less self-approving bravado.
The most fortunate among us in every generation are given mom’s simple instructions on virtue, honor and character as children. Having a loud-mouthed purveyor of preemptive guilt on one’s shoulder is not a bad way to go through life.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at editorial@therepublic.com.
