THE MISSING INGREDIENT

    Over and over we have all been asking ourselves how we reached this point, how we allowed a charlatan to reach the highest office in the land? How did this happen? Why did this happen? I have come to think that there is a missing ingredient in the behavior and the thinking of people these days, particularly the politcians.
     The ingredient is honor. There appears to be no honor left amongst most of the politicians or their handlers or staff. "What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? What is that 'honour'? Air."   William Shakespeare Henry IV Part I
     That is what is gone. There is no honor in serving the people anymore for now the motive appears to be simply greed and power and the acquisition of one and the maintenance of the other. Without that honor, we have nothing. We have no pride in ourselves as righteous people. We have no pride or feeling for our country and its residents except for how it can benefit us. We have no sense of humanity, no connection between others and ourselves and our families and even families have been thrown under the bus and betrayed.
     This lack of honor is seen in all levels of administration and government, be it here in CV or state or national levels. We apparently have been willing to cede all honor for the fleeting thoughts and minutes of a supposed prosperity, not realizing that it is all false, surface only, not seeing the poverty, the desperateness beneath. We have lost the honor that led us to welcome others who wished to share in the American Dream, debasing them, dehumanizing them, and have returned to the lowest points of humanity.
     How will history look back upon these times; how will they describe it, explain it? Josephine Tey, noted author, once said, "Honestly, I think historians are all mad."  Perhaps that is true, particularly if they try to analyze the history they are recording and/or studying. Will they recognize the lack of honor, why, its consequences and most important - when it started and if it ever ended, if we ever found our honor again and reverted to the people we should have been all along?
     Without honor there is no grace in life. Instead we have the shameful spectacle of investigations and hearings in front of the world, hearings that bare the greed and the corruption, the lack of honor that appears to be guiding these people. We have guesses as to whether a President's family will also go to prison and whether or not he will force his daughter to choose between her husband and her father. The creepy feelings this engenders are awful. They are shameful. 
     Perhaps there is some honor left in a few people. Elijah Cummings perhaps is one as he pleaded with his fellow Representatives and the American people that we can and should be better than this, this spectacle. He pleaded that our job here is to leave a better democracy for our children than the one we found and yet we are doing the exact opposite. Why? There is no honor and whomever stated that there is honor among thieves never got it so wrong as that!
     We have no honor here in the Village either as the presumed leader persists in using language of demeaning terms and connotations to describe those who dare to differ with his plans and opinions. We have a President of the nation who sets a vile example to follow as he rants and raves tweets away maniacally, and uses foul language. Never before, at least in public, have we heard or seen this behavior, this oral behavior as well in our presidents, certainly not to this degree.
      Never before have we had people supposedly in charge of making life better for their constituents forget that responsibility, be it in the debacle of AB, road paving, negligence in being proactive in the problems facing our Village, or the nation's administration which has apparnetly tossed all out in the garbage, ignoring the right and honorable thing to do, instead pressing forward with rollbacks of safety regulations, driving climate change even futher, basically robbing the people of the nation of their funds and the right to expect honorable behavior from these people.
    Folks. Cummings was right. We can do better than this. We are better than this. We need to dig down and find all that we have lost that is proper, right, honorable and yes, the new dirty word, progressive, for that is the true path of our country, ever more progressive in chasing down all the ways and manners by which we can improve the state of the nation, its people, and the state of the world.  
     Aristotle said it all. "At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst."  Are we the best or the worst? Will we return to the proper strivings or will we sink even further into the muck of dishonor, greed, selfishness, corruption? Are we noble people or are we the basest of all that we contain? Our choice. Our world. Our honor.