ETHICS

North Carolina’s former governor, Luther H Hodges, whose life exemplified high ethical standards, has become the model for ethics recognition and teaching by Rotary District 7710. As a young man I first met him in 1956 when I was a NC State Future Farmers of America officer. Just before my retirement from AmeriGas in 2000, on my last day of work in Chicago, I drove to nearby Evanston to visit the Rotary International headquarters. On that visit I observed a picture of Luther Hodges as one of the RI Presidents. It was a proud moment in the memory of a great statesman. Probably, Hodges was the most outstanding of all RI Presidents before or since, because he had already given high levels of leadership: Governor of North Carolina and US Commerce Secretary. His leadership for Rotary in 1967 would have been of unique qualification for a skilled presidential ambassador, traveling the world for the advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace.

The SECOND Object of Rotary is High ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society

A Rotary District 7710 “Ethics Luncheon” was held this year, February 11, 2009. Appropriately the RTP Rotary Club was the event sponsor because Governor Hodges was a greater impetus in the founding of the Research Triangle Park. Gene R Nichol, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Poverty, Work & Opportunity, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave the keynote address on ethics. Following is the text of his “ethics speech,” forgoing the preliminary remarks:

--------------------------------------------------------------
Keynote address by Gene Nichol: Rotary Ethics Luncheon RTP, February 11, 2009

I’m heartened this program is named for Luther Hodges -- our only modern governor to come from the business community – and, as I understand it, the only North Carolinian to be president of Rotary International. An executive at Marshall Fields – then Lt. Governor and Governor, and President Kennedy’s Commerce Secretary. Who took obligations of public service – citizen service -- extraordinarily seriously. Setting aside his private interests and conveniences in the cause of a public good. Central figure in the launching of the Research Park. Author of one of my favorite, and most timely, quotations” “If ignorance paid dividends, most Americans could make a fortune out of what they don’t know about economics.” Including lots of folks on Wall Street and Capitol Hill.

I was trying to imagine what Governor Hodges would think of our present circumstance. A $700 billion dollar bank buyout; a huge Detroit relief package; a separate $800 billion stimulus program; French made, tax subsidized corporate jets; bad banks’ billion dollars in bonuses. The new cover of Newsweek saying "We're All Socialists Now." Where’s Andy of Mayberry when we need him?

I really only want to make one small set of points today (about all this). I know we’re in an emergency. You know we’re in an emergency. We’re facing risks that, for so many of us, are unacceptable. So we will act. And act we should – even if it entails stepping a bit out into the dark – because when your children’s future is at stake, you act. Better to partially misstep -- in courage and dedication to their welfare -- than to sit back and let the darkness descend. I know this. I don’t dispute it. That’s not my point. We rightly regard these perils as unacceptable.

But I want to spend just a few minutes talking about the other side of that coin – the side of the coin that for twenty-five years or more – WE HAVE BELIEVED TO BE ACCEPTABLE. What we HAVE been willing to accept, to adjust ourselves to. To accommodate.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago on Martin Luther King’s birthday. I remembered that Dr. King described himself as chronically “unsatisfied”, as “maladjusted.” “I never did intend to adjust myself” he wrote, to “economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.” So, King claimed, “I call upon “all persons of good will to be maladjusted.” And I think he would have said to us, why, even before these difficulties, in the salad days of the last two decades, how could YOU have been satisfied?

1. How can we be satisfied when in North Carolina, one of the strongest and most idealistic communities, in the wealthiest nation on earth, the wealthiest nation in human history, almost fifteen percent of our citizens, over 1.3 million, live in stark unrelenting poverty? Figures far worse than other advanced western democracies allow. A poverty that is skewed by race – between 25 and 35 percent -- for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. A poverty that is skewed by geography. With 23 of our counties having very high poverty rates – all of them rural, and 18 of the 23 in the coastal plain. And a poverty that is skewed, to our shame, by age. With our youngest, and most vulnerable, the poorest among us. One in five North Carolina children; one in three black kids, four of ten Hispanics. As if any theory of justice or virtue could explain the exclusion of innocent children from the American dream.

2. And how could we be satisfied when, despite our claims of equal opportunity, and dignity, and that we’re all in this together, the top one percent, nationally, has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined? And our income gap between rich and poor is now greater than at any time since records started being kept over four decades ago; and is now documented to be the highest in the industrial world. While almost 40 million Americans don’t have enough to eat – a figure that will be worse when reported next year. So that that the Economist magazine, would write recently, the Economist, for goodness sake, hardly a leftist rag, that a “growing body of evidence suggests that the merit ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the gilded age…. But social mobility is not increasing... Everywhere you look in modern America … you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves … increasingly looking like imperial Britain.” How dare they say that? How dare it be true?

3. And how can we be satisfied when, nationally, over 46 million of us have no health care coverage of any kind, over 1.4 million North Carolinians. Leaving us alone among the industrial nations in failing to provide some form of universal coverage. Even though, as Dr. King argued, “Inequality in access to health is the most pernicious discrimination of all”. Among the major industrials, we rank first in wealth, first in military expenditures, first in gross domestic product, first in millionaires, first in billionaires, first in health technology spending, yet … we manage only 12th in standard of living for the poorest fifth of our society, 14th in efforts to lift children out of poverty, 16th in number of low birth weight babies. Amazingly, 23rd of 25 in infant mortality, and to our shame, 25th in children killed by gun violence.

4. How can we be satisfied, when across so much of North Carolina, and all of Virginia, and much of the nation, we allow rich and poor public schools? Not just private schools mind you, but rich and poor public schools. With the words of Leandro, and our state Supreme Court, echoing in our ears. Leading us to worry that the term “at risk” will become a description of a child’s fate, rather than his starting point and circumstance. As if it was thought acceptable to treat some of our children as second or third class citizens. Our religions teach that all children are equal in the eyes of God. We often operate our schools as if we didn’t believe it.

5. And how can we be satisfied when, in higher education, the vineyard in which I work, a study two years ago concluded that universities are more economically polarized today than at any time in the past three decades? So that if you come from a family making over $90,000 a year, your chances of getting a college degree by 24 are better than one in two. If your family makes $35,000 or less, the odds are one in seventeen. One in seventeen. The Education Testing Service finding, in surveying the student cohort at our 146 most selective universities, that fewer than 3% of the students came from families in the bottom economic quartile, and a whopping 75% come from the top economic quarter. As if wisdom, intellect, drive, ambition, and worth were somehow hereditary.

6. And with North Carolina’s Latino population growing so rapidly – 8% last year – up 5% or more every year since 2000 – with many kids, whose parents are undocumented, but who have mastered our middle schools and our high schools – but are then turned away from our colleges and universities -- as if we were better served by a permanent underclass. These realities raise tough questions. But I can’t believe North Carolina’s final answer will simply be the closed door and the clenched fist.

7. And again, in my venue, the legal system. The nation’s poor, who most need assistance, remain the least likely to get it. Jimmy Carter said a quarter century ago, when I hoped it was exaggeration, that we have the “heaviest concentration of lawyers on earth … but … ninety percent of [them] serve ten percent of our people. We’re over-lawyered and underrepresented.” Study after study, across the nation, across the south, across North Carolina, indicates at least 80% of the legal need of the poor is unmet. Fencing out millions on some of the most crucial issues of life. Ignoring what we have declared for four decades to be the cornerstone of our constitutional law: “that there can be no justice when the kind of trial a person gets depends on the amount of money he has”. Making a mockery of the phrase “equal justice under law” -- etched into our courthouse walls -- in every state, and every county, and every city of this country.

8. And, even in our politics, most foundational of all, it still seems that you have to pay in order to play. We’re the only people in the world who believe that our elected officials walk up to total strangers, ask for thousands, or now, hundreds of thousands of dollars, get it, and are completely unaffected by it. Achieving a state of perfect ingratitude. A system of government in which those who seek certain policies are allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to those who make the policies, can be called many things. But it can’t be called democratic. And it can’t be called fair.

9. And, finally, how have we been satisfied, when decade after decade, in cultural arena after cultural arena, in election after election, including even this historic presidential race, these debilitating disparities are barely even discussed? In law, in politics, in philosophy, in the academy, even in our pulpits, we turn our gaze away from those locked at the bottom of American life. Coming to think of a regime of economic apartheid as unassailable and unavoidable and untroubling.

Lincoln argued that the central purpose of America was that the weak should gradually be made stronger and that ultimately all would have an equal chance. But what was central for Lincoln has become foreign for us.

The frank truth is, if the exclusions and indignities of American poverty are right, then the Constitution is wrong.

If the debilitations of those locked at the bottom are acceptable, then our scriptures are wrong.

If these denials of equal citizenship and humanity are permissible, then we pledge allegiance to a cynical illusion, not a founding creed.

So I hope, as we set about meeting our challenges – through efforts in the public sector and in your own efforts and mine – we’ll keep in mind that some have been in peril well before the crashes of 2008 and 9. That we have been satisfied with exclusions and barriers and denials of opportunity and dignity that we should not have countenanced. Not if we are who we say we are. Not if we believe what we say we believe. Not if we are the people we have assumed ourselves to be.

So I hope we’ll commit, as we try to bail OURSELVES out, to a higher calling of citizenship as well. One remembering that we’re all in this together. We’ll subscribe to it. We’ll declare our commitment. We’ll enroll our hearts. We’ll enlist our spirits. We enlist because….

1. Somewhere we read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all are created equal.”

2. And somewhere we read, that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

3. And somewhere we read that “history will judge us on the extent to which we have used our gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of our fellows.”

4. And somewhere we read, that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.


5. And somewhere we read, “we have to believe the things we teach our children”, believe them and make them real.

6. And somewhere we read that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

7. And somewhere we read, that “whenever you did these things for the least of these, you did them for me.”

8. And somewhere we read, “You reap what you sew.”

9. And somewhere we read that the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of happiness can be as one. They march not in opposite directions, but hand in hand.

10. And somewhere we read, “no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”