DO THE RIGHT THING

My mother always said, "We do the right thing because it's the right thing to do."  When I first heard Martin Luther King say, "The time is always right to do the right thing."  I told Mother, "That sounds like you."  She said, "Well, I'm older;  he must be borrowing from me."

Yesterday, in discussing current events with my brother, I asked, "Why is doing the right thing so stunning these days?"

He answered, "Maybe it's because we aren't used to seeing integrity any more."

We admire Sally Yates, the former Acting Attorney General, who was fired because she was doing her job, but she still did the right thing when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.   The Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein did the right thing in appointing a Special Counsel; we wonder how long he will last.  When Senators McCain and Graham make their rare criticisms of the current Administration, we jump to praise them for doing the right thing.

Mitch Landrieu, the Mayor of New Orleans, did the right thing when he ordered that four Confederate monuments be removed, but he received criticism, protests, and death threats.  He stated, "You elected me to do the right thing and this is what it looks like.  These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and terror that it actually stood for."

The "leakers" who are being castigated by the current White House occupant, are heroes for doing the right thing, just as Mark Felt was a hero for doing the right thing.