Decency

The bar is low for us these days it seems and this is perhaps the most important thing we can do. As in chaos theory and the butterfly effect, perhaps the most profound thing each of us can and must do is being decent. The power of this is more than we realize.

”In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life — he lived to be 93 — he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym — “Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent — that’s what will be remembered.”