In making good decisions, an important indicator that the next move you are making is going to be harmful or at least bad for you and most likely others is the sense of shame. Shame, like anger is a short term emotional toxin that warns you not to proceed with a decisions or, if too late to stop the behavior. In a democracy living in the minority, the danger of the day is to let shame and anger set up house in your process of self because of a sequence of decisions made in your name by people you may have voted against. Yes, our government has abandoned allies in a crises, is committing crimes against innocent immigrants, has started a war without legal consent or consultation and is living in a gilded bird cage of denial. To the degree we are a democracy and want to be a democracy we feel in this moment in history with a strong pulse of shame. But if we don’t want to become incapacitated by shame and anger we have to understand the titration of shame. To titrate you must honestly name the shame because if you don’t the shame won’t name itself. Like anger unnamed and unowned shame works like a cancer across your whole body in anonymity becoming something more than just a warning regarding the decision process. Shame must never grow to dominate the story of your life, and shame must never grow to dominate a nation’s meta-story. The meta-story of the nation, like an individual is a dynamic evolution of accumulating individual episodes of decisions, heroic, beautiful, and shameful. Your first “good decision” is to commit to know yours and your nation’s whole true story. From its first appearance in your body, shame tells you to stop something in play and commit overtly to an action to counter that feeling. If you don’t, your motivation for good has cancer. Don’t live with shame, titrate it through actions of atonement. 

Modest Suggestion for Good

This writer is not ashamed of this country’s story. I feel a natural irritation with people who think I should be ashamed to be American. But I can be an American living in a shameful era. Shame is the shadow of pride.  Our history in the United States is a rocky road but as a people, in the past, when we have failed in our aspirations of plurality, generosity and individual justice  we have recommitted, and exerted to excel once again.  Maybe we were too proud of a brave, generous aspirational history we couldn’t carry into our own time; hence the shame we can’t shake. Our history isn’t a shame, but in slices of time our behavior has been shameful and in this last year we, as a nation, have behaved shamefully. To take this on as meta shame of a nation would be irresponsible.  We have to own our time’s behavior, titrate our the nature of our actions, and use the pain of it to move on with our renewed aspirations as generations of Americans have done before us. Our Constitution is presently like the old warships of the 19’th century, battered, bruised, taking on water but still afloat. Lets patch, reinforce, use the elections to set the sail, join our allies again if they will have us, and strive for a world of freedom and peace. That would be good.