Shish,

Thank you as well for your thoughtful response. I think we’ve moved beyond the original issue (of a father trying to encourage his daughter to look for someone with honor) to a bigger, and for Americans better, question: what does it mean to have honor?

I would venture to guess that most people who live in a society where most people operate above the “trying to survive” level compartmentalize different aspects of their own psyches. As you say so well, it’s entirely possible for someone to behave honorably vis-a-vis their family, their friends, and their immediate community, while at the same time behaving dishonorably outside that circle. Not to go all Godwin’s law here, but certainly many Nazis would have considered themselves “honorable” and even been able to be viewed as such when looking at how they relate to their families and friends — and yet, their ability to dehumanize some “other” group renders them dishonorable as a whole. This fragmentation of the self seems to be an unfortunate byproduct of having to hold too many conflicting ideas at the same time — and may be, in our society, the thin veneer that, frankly, keeps many from going mad.

America in particular has a real problem with this, I agree. We are a country founded on high ideals and on the labor of slaves; we are a country of rugged individualists who saw little harm in exterminating the Native peoples who had lived here for thousands of years; we are a country that presents itself as though we hold strongly to Christian (in the main) ideals and yet too often act as though power and wealth are the highest ends. I don’t have an answer for this. Living in wholeness is hard; every single day provides opportunities to be a hypocrite and a saint, and most people (myself included) I think just try to navigate those poles as best as possible.

The big problem that I see is that America, because of its power, has a greater responsibility to not just muddle through these conflicts, but to actually own up to them. To acknowledge that we have a history in which we have been in the wrong sometimes and to make genuine efforts to not make those same mistakes again (and to heal the wrongs that we’ve caused). There are people here demanding that we do exactly that; that’s what gives me hope.

Boy, this went a long way from a conversation about what a father wants for his daughter, eh? :)