Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [15]
And it continued at work. My boss and I discussed a trial victory from the morning before, and I can tell that he was impressed with my conduct of that matter and the bail hearings. I should say, at this point, that notwithstanding all the campaign ads that feature alarmingly high conviction rates, the role of a prosecutor in the criminal justice system is not really to win or lose but rather to place all the relevant evidence fairly before the court so that justice might be done. No, I’m serious. They even give us little plaques that say something like that. Thus, I had a nagging sense that my happiness at the victories might, in fact, be transgressions on the virtue chart. Justice, in the Franklin sense, would seem consistent with the quasi-judicial role of a prosecutor. I, on the other hand, was patting myself on the back over a couple of courtroom triumphs. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt.
And then, of course, there is Humility. I was gloating. That seemed to be the direct opposite of Humility. Personal backslapping would certainly merit a tick on the transgression chart. Maybe, I reasoned, I should keep my eye on the ball and concentrate more on Temperance.
As Karma would have it, I paid the price that afternoon. I took a beating in another trial continuation. This one involved a sister stabbing her brother during a drunken argument. Not only did I go down in flames, but an inebriated, homeless woman came into the courtroom during my cross-examination of the accused and began to shout, “She’s innocent!” I assumed this was a message from Powerful Goodness. He (or she) was probably still upset about being addressed from the toilet.
I was also a little concerned about my adherence to the schedule part of the program: Ben’s day planner. Ben began the day with asking himself what “good” he would do and then ended the day with a self-check on his success. I’d taken a shot at this but it had been halfhearted. On Day 1, I forgot to come up with a “good.” On Day 2, I chose “follow up on planning golf trip.” While I accomplished that goal, it was hardly altruistic—more self-centered, really. No one is going to bestow on me the Nobel Peace Prize because I successfully planned a trip where I, my dad, a couple of uncles and cousins, and assorted friends beat the bejesus out of a little ball, eat steak, and drink beer. Tomorrow, I resolved, I’d pick something far less self-centered.
I owed it to myself.
On the plus side, I had managed, on Day 2, not to eat any between-meal snacks or anything after supper. This, for a man of my proclivities, was a major victory. It would have been nice to think that I’d mastered this Temperance thing, but I had a feeling that I might not be getting the full flavor of what Temperance means. I was concerned that perhaps I was not committed enough to this first virtue and its real essence. I needed to do more research.
Temperance: The Early Years
As I carried on through my week of Temperance, I was still a little confused about how to follow Ben’s virtue. Stuck with it, as I was, I rededicated myself to ferreting out what Ben was after with Temperance. It was more confusing than I had first thought. Perhaps the problem was that despite Ben’s admonition to be temperate, he himself was something less (maybe Ben would forgive my snacking after all).
He, of course, acknowledged a level of consistent imperfection early on in his description of the program, but a look at any of his portraits or busts reveals a man given to at least a little intemperance. Willard Randall says that in 1755 Franklin’s “face was puffy and smooth from gout, his body overweight and rounded into the peculiar barrel shape of the once-powerful swimmer too long out of the