Old Words Like "Integrity" Biting the Dust

By Dale Short Words get obsolete so fast, nowadays, you can almost hear them zip past your ears just before they smash into the Windshield of Time. "Dustbin" and "buttonhook" are two of my favorites that have passed from use, and it's looking like "typewriter" may soon join them. I asked my granddaughter if she was studying typing in third grade and she thought I was talking about DNA samples. The skill is called "keyboarding" now. But even my wireless keyboard is starting to look a little long in the tooth; touchscreen devices seem to be winning the day. (I hope the schools don't replace it with a class called "touching," or else the religious fundamentalists will have it banned.) Another word I haven't heard used in years is "integrity." It's not so much that the word itself has gone out of style, just the commodity that it represents. True, I still hear engineers occasionally refer to "structural integrity." As for human beings with integrity, not so much. And least of all in politics. Mr. Webster tells us the word means "The state of being whole and undivided." In my Scots-Irish family, it was explained a little differently: "My neighbor may be a nasty, grumpy old son-of-a-gun. But at least he's exactly the same way, every time you see him." Integrity. For people of our heritage, that could pass for a letter of recommendation. It's not like the disappearance of integrity has gone unnoticed. Politicians and their handlers have even coined a name for it: "flip-flopping." If somebody running for office has changed anything except their socks and underwear in the past 30 years, their opponents nail them immediately: "Nyah, nyah!" they shout. "Flip-flopper! Flip-flopper!" And the poor candidate (OK, rich candidate) who changed his/her mind about some issue in the 1980s suddenly plummets in the polls. Next victim, please. I've read about a psychological concept called "cognitive dissonance," which basically means that a person can say/believe two opposite things, insist that both of them are true, and not see any conflict in their logic. I remember back during the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the politicians in office told us on TV, "To criticize our president when the nation is at war is worse than un-American...it's treason. You might as well be

shooting bullets at our own soldiers. We have to support our president 100 percent, no matter what." More recently, these same people have told us on TV that our new Commander in Chief is an idiot, a joke, not even a citizen but a foreign terrorist, is going about our continuing wars in a totally messed up way, and thus should be overthrown by an uprising in the streets of good God-fearing patriots who want to "take our nation back"...back, that is, from the guy who won the election. If worse comes to worst, said a guy who showed up at the president's town hall meeting with a semi-auto pistol strapped to his leg, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." So the rules they gave us for proper American behavior less than a decade ago have clearly flip-flopped (pardon the expression) and nobody sent me the memo. I'm not old enough to have been around for the invention of dirt, but I was a serious user of version 1.2. As a result, I have actually known a politician with integrity. In fact, his house--now the Congressman Carl Elliott Museum--is a few blocks down the street from us. The people who wrote the Constitution pledged "our lives, our sacred honor," and they risked both. So did Mr. Elliott. He ran for governor of Alabama against the entrenched Segregation machine in the bloody 1960s, and when meager donations ran out he cashed in his pension to continue the fight. He was openly threatened at rallies by Klansmen. The election was only part of what he lost. In recent years, office-seekers with integrity have surfaced rarely, here and there. One that comes to mind is a man named Paul Wellstone. He bucked the establishment 24/7, and he, his wife, and daughter died in a mysterious plane crash. The good news is that there's somebody, somewhere, with integrity running for political office even as we speak. They're not quite on the establishment's radar yet, but they will be. And I'll bet money that his/her truth-telling will be similarly rewarded as Mr. Elliott's and Mr. Wellstone's. God bless America. # # #

(Dale Short is a native of Walker County. His columns, books, photos, and radio features are available on his website, www.carrolldaleshort.com, and his weekly program "Music from Home" is broadcast Sundays at 6 pm on Oldies 101.5 FM. For information about his upcoming series of photography workshops at Woni's Bookshelf in Sumiton, you can phone the store at 648-6161.)