Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [61]
And yet in the throes of the conclusion of the virtue of Sincerity, I was confronted with a question that called for this textured honesty. From the standpoint of the chronicler, this was an unbelievable opportunity—manna from heaven for the virtue seeker.
A big pile of sidewalk dog poo for a husband.
But whatever it meant to me, my wife’s question meant so much more to her. She was seeking a real, honest assessment for her own reasons. She deserved Sincerity. You see, I knew, when my wife asked me what I thought of her, that she asked it in the context of her ongoing internal struggle over whether or not she had made the right choice to forgo her career—at least temporarily—to stay home with our three young children (she was just returning to work on a part-time basis). It is a classic struggle manifested by the nature of our modern society, one made all the more poignant for my wife by the fact that we are the parents of a child who requires special attention. That was, I understood, the context of my wife’s question.
In that moment, I felt like a veil was lifted. For the first time in Ben Franklin’s course, I understand a virtue completely, and that understanding had given me instant results. Sincerity, in the Franklin sense, provided a context for the answer my wife was seeking.
So I told my wife the truth. I told her that I think she is an extraordinary person, strong-willed, opinionated, and an excellent mother. I told her that I think she would be remembered by her children as a mother who made a sacrifice so that they could be happier. I told her that I believe in the fullness of time that she will regard this as a right decision regardless of what our children think. I told her the truth.
No “Do you like my dress?” questions and answers here. No textured truth. No Albert Camus. Just Sincerity, in the way I believe Franklin intended it.
I noted, for the first time, a clean slate on my virtue checklist.
I could have hugged Ben.
SINCERITY
{CHAPTER 8}
Justice
Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting
the benefits that are your duty
{ A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.}
HERE’S A FACT ABOUT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN NOT WIDELY KNOWN. HE was intensely proud of being an Englishman. And by Englishman, I mean a citizen of England. That’s what he considered himself: a citizen of the land against which he would eventually take up arms (metaphorically). Revolution would have been the last thing he would have considered almost up to the point of . . . well . . . the Revolution. He has been called a reluctant revolutionary. He was an Englishman, was proud of it, and felt entitled to the benefits that such citizenship entailed. It is hard to think of Franklin as a Loyalist nearly three centuries later, but that is exactly what he was, at least up to the point where he believed that loyalty was no longer warranted. Indeed, when he was the representative, in England, of several of the colonies, he had a notion that he might permanently relocate there. He enjoyed the rights and liberties of being an Englishman. It was only when he perceived that those rights were being unjustly withheld that he became one of the leaders of the creation of a new nation. How might the world have been different if King George and his boys had simply followed Franklin’s course of virtues?
Though Franklin wrote of Justice long before the American Revolution, some of the reasons for his participation in that historic event can be found in this very virtue. Franklin understood Justice. I, on the other hand,