When I was in high school, I was required by Mrs. Lambert to memorize bits and pieces of poetry and other famous literature. I hated it, probably because memorizing is not something I’m particularly good at. But I got a small benefit from it as watched the tributes to George H.W. Bush. One of the passages that we memorized was Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

It wasn’t the tributes that reminded me of the passage so much as the reaction to them. Some people said that, since he had done a number of bad things in his presidency (and before), there should have been no such praise. The attacks brought to mind the end of the same speech.

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.  

I was no fan of either of Bush’s. I thought that they, especially George W. when he invaded Iraq, did a lot of harm to the country. But the things that I disagreed with didn’t sum up their lives. I think both Bush’s were honorable men who did what they thought right at the time. The fact that some of those things were proved not to be right by passing time is just proof of the value and validity of hind sight. But the fact that we judge people by a single aspect of their lives scares me.

I would like to think that I would be remembered better by people who know me than by my worst acts.

On the evening news I saw where Chick-fil-a has been banned on the campus of some universities and in some cities because of the CEO’s remarks about gay marriage. He’s against it.

For most of my life I’ve tried to remember that, as a straight white guy, I had no right to tell minorities, LGBTQ people, or women what they should offended by. But this made me wonder. Here we had an institutional or governmental ban on a business because the CEO was on the wrong side of a controversial issue. (I say “wrong side” because I, like most people these days, consider the side that I’m not on to be the wrong side. We’ve lost the capacity to say “the other side.”)

However, he also runs a company that gives opportunities to young people, that provides a good product, and has been a good corporate citizen in Atlanta. When I was teaching Sunday School, one of my students worked at Chick-fil-a through high school, and they put him through college. After college he went to work for them as a manager. 

My question is: isn’t there some sort of balance of actions and opinions? Do we ignore the good and act only on what we consider the bad?

This sort of tunnel vision is leading us into some strange areas.

President Trump, tweeting his opinion on the controversy regarding the Confederate memorials, said that next they’ll be coming for the memorials for Jefferson and Washington. My first thought was this made about as much sense as Trump usually makes, which is to say, not much. However, I’ve seen some people questioning the worth of Washington and Jefferson since they owned slaves.

Rationally, there’s no equivalence between a memorial to Stonewall Jackson and a memorial to George Washington.

Jackson was a general in an army in rebellion against the United States. The Confederacy lost, and that made him a traitor. If the Confederacy had won, he would have been a patriot. We don’t memorialize traitors.

Washington, on the other hand, led an army in rebellion against the British. We won. That made him a patriot. But…how about his slaves?

This is where we really run into a problem. We are judging him, a somewhat distant historical figure, by current standards. Most people today consider slavery to be illegal, inhuman, and beneath a civilized society. It wasn’t that way in the 18^th century in the South. Rich, white people owned slaves, and George Washington was a rich white person.

In the middle of the 19^th century, shortly after the Southern Baptist Convention was founded, they were asked to rule on whether it was Christian to whip slaves. It was assumed that it was Christian to own slaves, but there was a question, at least in some minds, as to what the limits in dealing with them might be. The ruling was that since it was necessary to discipline slaves, one might whip a slave in a Christian manner.

Times have changed, and we might be thankful for that. But we shouldn’t forget that times have changed.

I wish we could develop a more nuanced approach to judgment, if indeed we have to judge every act by every person we encounter. Most of our lives are some sort of assortment of good and bad, helpful and hurtful, useful and futile. And, if we feel compelled to act on our opinion of someone, I wish that we look at the balance of the life.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept anything by anybody. There are people whom I choose not to talk to because I simply don’t care for their opinions or the way they express them. That’s the reason I’ve unfriended a few people on Facebook. But that’s simply my exercising a personal prerogative. I don’t suggest that they be banned, incarcerated, or otherwise punished. In fact, I have a great deal of respect for a couple of these people in other areas of their life.

We can choose our friends. Choose our television programs. Choose the forums in which we wish to participate. That’s all personal.

But when we pick a single action, opinion, or attitude from somebody’s life and damn them for it, I think we’re setting a standard by which none of use can be judged as good.

Antony said that Caesar had been accused of being ambitious, but he had seen him weep with the poor, that he had been presented—and had refused—the crown on three occasions. Whether Caesar was ambitious or not, the good should not be interred with the bones while we remember only the evil.