Growing up in our divided country  is a numbing challenge for both today’s youth and young adults.  The current government is busy trashing the language of virtue, disdaining ethics, and simply ignoring morality.  Our leadership is promoting pragmatism, and purely transactional relationships, while picking the pockets of our children’s future with lavish spending. All of this is occurs while the president has been talking with great sanctimony about tax cuts.  Of course, to many youth, nihilism seems like the only honest remaining option for the person with their eyes and minds open to events. But nihilism isn’t the only option at all for the honest person.  Rebuilding democracy right now appears to be desperately needed and positive task waiting for any American citizen over the age of childhood.  

We as a society are in danger of sending out a generation of youth without a sense of shared mission and purpose in which to ground their individual goal setting because we, the older adults, are ungrounded ourselves.  The word secular comes from the latin saeculum, meaning “worldly” or “of this age”.  Secular is not anti-religious. The disease of this age is a few extremely powerful and wealthy men and women who routinely violate the secular virtues necessary for a democracy to function have captured the attention and controls of our nation. Secular does not mean anti-religious.  Secular has a profound religious significance in that secular language can put forward universal virtues to congregate around a purpose while at the same time allowing a diversity of religious adherents to freely practice those virtues within their rites and rituals. Ecumenical has many meanings but at its latin roots means universal or “of this age”.  The secular ecumenical vocabulary of virtue includes such words as honesty, tolerance, justice, generosity, kindness, and civility.  This vocabulary is secular because no single religious practice can claim it.  This writer is pretty sure secular virtue contains the last unifying set of words and energy to could still reunite this nation.  These ecumenical virtues could bring together the religious and the non religious allowing both belief systems to create a society that could agree on what language is critical for survival and serve as the safe ground upon which to resolve differences.  

Modest Proposal for Good

This is the stage of an age of despair and nihilism where your sense of good is needed to move into a meaningful and even heroic role in the reclamation of our democracy.  Don’t let the foolishness and vulgarity of this current exercise in governance  suspend your vocabulary and practice of the virtues of democracy.  This posting listed: honesty, tolerance, justice, generosity, kindness, and civility as a starting list of secular ecumenical virtues.  Make a list for yourself of the virtues you value to promote and practice.  Talk about virtue and value with friends and neighbors and  I assure you feeling and color will come back into your world.  Building a common ground outside the toxic political discourse would be resistance with a unifying grounding  purpose and that would be very very good.