COMMENTARY: When a town chooses to profit from evil, what happens to its soul?

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.) UNDATED _ I drove my 17-year-old son to work Saturday morning. He still smelled of the previous night’s cigarettes. His smoker’s cough was constant and juicy. I live […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ I drove my 17-year-old son to work Saturday morning. He still smelled of the previous night’s cigarettes. His smoker’s cough was constant and juicy.


I live in a tobacco town, where the prevailing norm is not to complain publicly about smoking. Too many jobs depend on tobacco. Hospitals get away with no-smoking policies because they deal daily with the truth about cancer and emphysema. But the city as a whole stays quiet.

Understandably so. We all know people who work for R.J. Reynolds. They’re nice people, solid citizens. If Reynolds closed shop, the local economy would nose-dive. Much of what makes this city gracious _ including Reynolds High School, which my older sons attend _ had its origins in tobacco and RJR’s norm of civic-mindedness. Winstons and Salems have made a lot of money for a lot of people. I understand why smoking is rarely questioned in public here.

We aren’t alone. Across the country, communities depend on industries like tobacco and don’t dare reflect on their shortcomings. I remember covering”black lung”strikes in the coal fields. They had to be wildcat strikes by anxious workers because everyone else said, in effect, forget coal dust. These are the only jobs around.

Textile towns in the South endured feudal attitudes toward labor relations because mills had jobs and questioning was met with violence. Steel towns in Pennsylvania breathed dust-laden air, remained in ghettos defined by a rigid class system, and watched helplessly as management stubbornly refused to adopt new technology, preferring instead to complain about imports. Where else could people work? Even Seattle, a mecca for young techies, has rumblings about Boeing treating workers like disposable commodities, and Microsoft nurturing an ethic of total commitment to job, at the expense of family obligations and personal burnout.

But the rumblings seem muted and wistful. These are high-paying jobs.

It isn’t just corporate America. College towns have the same dilemma. So do communities dominated by government. How do citizens hold accountable the major employer, when that employer is all that stands between the town and economic flameout? The ethical dilemma, however, is more than jobs. What happens to the soul of a town when it profits from the sale of disease? Or sends its men to early death in the mines? Or hires children to spin yarn? Or hires illegal immigrants to pick lettuce but refuses to educate their children?

Legalities aside, how honest can a community be about anything when it can’t deal openly with the ethical quandary that lies at the center of its economy? It’s like depression. When a person shuts down one emotion, such as anger, all emotions shut down. Selective honesty doesn’t work.

Each of us wears several hats: We are citizens, employees, family members and children of God. Which comes first? As citizens, we value a healthy economy and the jobs and consumer benefits it provides. As employees, we know that our livelihoods might well depend on overlooking poor working conditions or harmful products that we make.


As family members, we worry about our over-stressed spouses and quasi-orphaned children. We see personal damage being done by the very forces that pay the mortgage.

As children of God, we know that we are held accountable for the world we help to create or to destroy. It will do no good before God to explain that our paychecks depended on selling cigarettes to minors.

In my own case, I have to see that this city has many boosters, but my son has only one father. If I don’t worry about his welfare, who will? If I can’t persuade him to stop smoking, who can?

We are, you see, more than workers and shoppers. We are ethical beings. Just as the economy is the sum total of a whole lot of individual decisions, so is our ethical environment. Our society is life-giving or life-depleting because of decisions we make in our individual lives. The front line in any ethical conflict is what an individual will do or put up with.

The question is: Are we willing to get out of step in order to do the right thing?

MJP END EHRICH

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