Choosing the Harder Right Over the Easier Wrong
August 25th, 2021 by admin
When I was in high school the city where I grew up had been given a real deal on a nine-hole golf course that was owned and operated by a country club in the heart of the city. The course was in a very nice and established neighborhood. The club was going to build a course in another part of the county where there was room for an eighteen-hole course.
The city’s choice was whether it should sell the land for home lots for additional revenues, in the process decreasing the likelihood that a tax increase would be necessary in the near term, or to continue to operate it as a public course.
My father served on the city council, and most of the nine-hole course was in his ward. Some of the citizens of his ward would much prefer to sell the land by lots for new, high-priced homes, which likely would increase their property values, too. And “what kind of people,” some asked, would use the existing course if it was a public course instead of for country club members?
The only public golf course was in the far end of the geographically large county, and it was not readily accessible to most citizens who could not afford to be members of country clubs (or who back in those times were not asked to join, for arbitrary reasons), but many of whom were regular and even avid golfers. Citizens my father called “a guy named Joe,” his euphemistic phrase for regular folks without power or pedigree in an old city built on old money which honored those things more than most. Growing up in harder times, my father knew a lot about the guy named Joe.
Bill Mohler, also a council member, was a lawyer. Like my father, he was a strong fiscal conservative. But as a cracker-jack trial lawyer whose clientele included all classes of citizens, he knew a lot about the guy named Joe, too.
When the initial vote was taken on whether to keep the course as a public course, only Bill Mohler and my father, neither of whom was a golfer, voted to keep operating the nine-hole course.
My father and Mr. Mohler set out to make their case. With some financial experience, my father helped to shape a plan to make the public course not only revenue neutral but modestly revenue producing. Mr. Mohler advocated on the floor of the city council that a more accessible public course was the right thing to do to serve all the citizens of the city, and to look past short-term challenges to the long-term betterment of the entire community.
In time, they prevailed, really against challenging odds. The city council, in a close vote, made a bet to give right a chance to make right. And with time and effective financial management, the citizens of the city made good on that bet.
It took political courage by the Council to vote for the harder right, speaking on behalf of diverse citizens almost certainly without their own clear, collective voice. The value of an accessible public course had a longer delivery date, versus the more immediate sale of valuable home lots. Especially with a city election right around the corner.
This courage to stand for the harder right over the possible adverse political consequences to the office holders up soon for re-election seems harder to find these days.
Midway through my law school studies, my father, who was not a lawyer but who saw the positive impact a lawyer could have on a community, spoke to me about what kind of lawyer I should be. He spoke to me about three lawyers that late December he admired who I should try to emulate, and one of those lawyers was Bill Mohler. A principled lawyer who chose the harder right before the long-term gain to the city was more clearly seen by others. And who stood up to fight for it, so that right did have the chance to make right in the end.
In the movie, The Scent of a Woman, we all remember Al Pacino’s dramatic speech at the end of the movie. He speaks of his own encounter with this question. He chose an easier path in his early career, and that path, in time, led to his own personal Ledger of Regret. A fork in the road of life he wished he had back because he did not have the courage then to choose the harder right. Which courage he gathers toward the end of his life to give his student friend, Charlie, the strength to help him stay the course to choose the harder right in his own young life at a critical point.
This is how these choices may come to the rest of us, too, pressed upon us sometimes quickly by life’s uncertain evets. Choices which may involve core issues which only you and your life’s principled travelling companion, conscience, may see. And the real reason your conscience calls on you to choose the harder right, and to change your personal direction, may not be fully known for any number of reasons by others you know and respect.
Other choices will be out in the open, where you choose to stand up for the harder right, which may take longer to achieve. And there may be criticism, some harsh and less than objective, along the way. Which is why these choices often require staying power and fighting through the doubts and doubters to give right the chance to make right.
But when life takes its final measure of you, the times you choose the harder right over the sometimes easier just go along wrong will be the choices you will cherish the most. Choices, when thoughtfully made, which rarely find their way to your personal Ledger of Regret, despite the disguise in which they often travel.
“Choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong,” said Thomas Monson, a thoughtful leader in his own times. And Thomas Jefferson, too, a thoughtful leader for all times.
What I have learned about life on the way to the courthouse is this: a full life provides to us any number of choices between the harder right and the sometimes just go along easier wrong. In my father’s emphasis to me, it was about the ability of a lawyer to advocate for the harder right, and why being a principled lawyer was so important.
But the equally longer reach of this story, for me, is that this principled lawyer and my father took a big political risk in choosing the harder right, and they led the Council to take that risk, too, considering that the next city election was not far around the corner. On the road to the right thing to do for the city and all its citizens, including a guy named Joe.
Your cause, whatever your career path, may or may not be about a guy named Joe, and the long-term gain may not be fully known for a while around life’s sometimes uncertain corner. But it is your own character, revealed in these hard but principled choices, which can help carry the day. When you call on your internal grit to work against the doubt to steady the collective hand of others to see it through. A choice to give right a fighting chance to make right.
And along the way to find that sweet spot, that enduring balance in life’s essential equation between making a living and making a life, to harness Churchill’s thoughtful insight.
Which does not mean you will always prevail. But it does mean you have to try. You just have no real idea of the positive example you set for others when you choose to stand up for the harder right. Because people know courage and character when they see it.
And when you thoughtfully choose the harder right over the easier wrong, with all its challenges, you make good on every bet anyone has ever put on you. Including your own.
Mike Wells
Postscript. My father won his next election after the golf course decision (as did Mr. Mohler.) Over a twenty- plus year career in elected positions with the city, the state house and state senate, my father won all his elections, including his last one before he retired from public service, save for one.
Posted in: On the Way to the Courthouse