Wrong Choices

Written by Joe Pisani
Thursday, 27 August 2009 00:00

A Jaguar was waiting at the red light when I pulled up to the intersection Monday morning in a respectable suburban community we all aspire to. A moment later, an Explorer crept up behind me.

No cars were coming, so the Jag went through the light. I resisted the temptation to press down on the horn and start yelling like a vigilante. The day was young. There would be enough time for that later on.

Since I’m a dutiful law-abiding citizen à la Jimmy Stewart, I intended to wait for the light to turn green — but then the fellow behind me beeped his horn.

He wanted me to go through the red light, too. Did he have an emergency and need a public restroom? Did the fact the Jaguar broke the law make it OK for the rest of us to do the same thing? These possibilities ran through my brain as my blood pressure approached the danger zone.

I had to make a moral decision. Should I follow the herd and run the light? Should I do the right thing and act like a wuss with this guy breathing down my neck? Or should I get out of the car and beat the daylights out of him? So many choices before my first cup of coffee.

What was happening at this light —if I can put it in metaphysical terms — was symptomatic of the collapse of morality over the past 50 years. Our sense of obligation to obey the law and do the right thing has seriously eroded in big things and in little things.

We’ve entered a new and frightening era when people believe they know better than the law. They’re “above the law.” They’re enlightened. They don’t need rules. They don’t want rules. Nietzsche would have loved them.

Our kids confront this every day. They face peer pressure over moral decisions, and the greatest pressure comes from the forces coercing them to do the wrong thing. Sad to say, most of them have never been taught what the right thing is, or they’ve been led to believe the right thing is what feels good.

Doing right can be difficult enough, and when everyone is ridiculing you, the choice becomes even harder.

As I sat there fuming, a familiar excuse popped into my brain: “Everybody is doing it, so it can’t be wrong.” After all, running red lights seems perfectly justifiable, as socially acceptable as recreational sex, smoking pot and cheating on tests.

The guy behind me hit the horn again, and I felt pressured to go though the light. Why be a choirboy?

But then my mother whispered in my ear, “If everybody jumps off the bridge, are you going to jump, too?”

“No, Mom,” I said, “Not yet.”

There’s a mountain of insidious excuses to break the law in little ways and in big ways. And moral debacles like Enron and AIG start at the intersection with little wrong choices that turn into big wrong choices.

Joe Pisani has been a writer and editor for 30 years. Questions or comments, e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .