by Stanley W. Shura

Created on: March 24, 2009   Last Updated: April 23, 2010

We Americans, and perhaps most of the world's industrialized populace, especially those of us not possessed of particularly elevated economic status and privilege, do have our favorite punching bags, don't we?  Lawyers are up there. Tax cheats - maybe, depending on whom. Deadbeat *parents*. Overpaid celebrities and sports superstars. The "media".

But arguably, the most scrutinized and criticized and satirized subgroup out there is politicians. Most of the time, this "fishbowl" oversight of our public servants' conduct is not only deserved, it is part of what makes the process called democracy work. More to the point, however, is that politicians ASK us to be put where they are. They KNOW to whom they answer before they ever take their oaths, because they spend oodles of time and even oodles more money sucking up to the public whose vote they so covet and on whom their very positions depend.

Still, running for and serving in public office does not mean doing so as the standard bearer of all behavior, nor the bearer. quite frankly, of any moral authority whatsoever. No matter what work you do, no matter who you've vowed to serve, no matter what compensation you make and no matter what the stakes are, everyone has the right to his time and life *off* the clock.

That said, everyone, politicians included, has the moral obligation to uphold in their behavior what they profess and claim to believe and by which sense, and search for clarity of said sense, of right and wrong they honestly believe is valid and, in their deepest of hearts, decent.

That standard should be - and IS - the same for all of us. The mistake we the public sometimes make is to blur the line between visibility and accountability. A change in one does NOT dictate, mandate, create or imply a change in the other. There are those people who might be poised to argue quite strenuously that those in the limelight DO have the burden of higher standards.

I disagree just as wholeheartedly. Because that standard should be the same for, and strived for with equal and unequivocal intensity, every single one of us. That standard is decency. That is a standard to which every single one of us has a *sacred* and precious obligation. It is a burden placed on and a potential achievable by all of us no matter what our station or position in life or "society". It is not society to which we owe this debt of a well-intentioned life.

It is owed by all of us for the very gift of life itself.

Every single one of us bears that same standard and obligation from birth. We owe it to ourselves and to the world in which we have been blessed to live. Politicians are no better, and although our visceral response may indicate otherwise, no worse, collectively, than anyone else. It is not that they should be held to a higher standard. It's that their public position puts them in the spotlight - both when they excel, and when they flounder. But all of us were bestowed with the same miraculous, astronomically unlikely phenomenon called birth. With that birth, that gift, we are blessed and burdened with the same rights and the responsibility to be their stewards, for our own selves, and for everyone else. It is the only way we can show the proper respect and thankfulness for this gift of life.

That gift is the same for all of us.

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