Dear editor:
Ethical comity, civility and respect as it pertains to being responsible, fully functional citizens of this community, state and nation is important.
As a nearly eight-decade-old Missourian and American citizen, Vietnam veteran, retired educator, advocate for functional families, member of the board of the Missouri Veterans Hall of Fame, gubernatorial appointee of the Missouri Ethics Commission, past president of the Stars and Stripes National Museum and Library, founding director of the Stars and Stripes Historic Region Foundation and general old fogie and curmudgeon, I would ask all of us to step back and consider our role as responsible citizens not only in this election but in every election local state and National and in the interim as we go about our so blessed lives in this beautiful, exemplarily free and eminently functional and productive, if not yet perfect union/democracy and republic.
I would argue from the perspective of my considerable, if admittedly eminently fallible years that if we're to be truly useful and productive citizens, we must continuously strive, struggle and work to develop and sustain the following qualities:
– To be always committed to working toward the perfect union which our forefathers set up as a goal for us, if not perfectly achievable, always to be striven far with all our effort and might, every day of our lives!! Not just in military service, but in service to our communities, our fellow man wherever he might be, and by informing ourselves and participating as fully as humanly possible in the governance of our beautiful democracy with the full knowledge that we all as human beings, by definition are eminently fallible and subject to all of the human weaknesses that God laid out so clearly in the Bible and virtually every religion, ethicist and philosopher worldwide has acknowledged for millennia.
– That we work with all our fellow citizens of this nation and of the world, whoever they might be to strive with all our will and effort for comity, always with a humble, honest, openness and willingness to bend over backward ... yes friends, bend over backward to learn, listen to, strive to understand and most difficult but most necessary of all, resolve our sometimes seemingly insurmountable differing points of view.
If we do not, I can assure you as a historian who has explored virtually every conflict humans have engaged in from the Stone Age forward, in a world with more than 8 billion of us now, with our immeasurable differences, uncounted potential conflicts, much less existing ones and most frighteningly of all, with our burgeoning climate issues and an avalanching technical capacity multiplying seemingly every minute due to our greed, fear and a seemingly insatiable lust for power, if we are to survive, we do not have the luxury of doing otherwise.
Jim Martin
Perryville
