Good readers, it might be helpful to you before you read this to view this half-century old recording of one of the great moments in the history of America public life, and an important moment in my own life. This exchange shaped me more than anything my own father ever said to me, I traveled as a child on my own in a Greyhound bus to Boston and New York to see it many times. It lives on today in my dreams, and in the continuing and never-ending struggle over the soul of my country. It is the very famous exchange  between Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Boston attorney, a famously moral man, an attorney from Boston named Joseph Welsh. It exposed the evil and broken moral compass of the senator and his movement. For me, it has many echoes of today.  I think of it now, after a Pakistani immigrant named Khazr Khan appeared on on national television to teach Donald Trump about liberty.  A moral man changed our history one more, and showed how powerful moral men and women can be. You can see it here.

While wars of one kind or another boil around me, and media arguments and spins rage like crows on the telephone lines, here on the farm we unholy innocents are eager to get our hay in the barn for the winter, our firewood in the shed, our plumbing in order and the growing pile of manure moved before the earth freezes.

Sometimes the world crashes in on us, and this is happening this week. The very air is alive with concern and anger, there is no wall around our new technology.

Still, we all live in the same world, and I never wish for my farm to be a hiding place, a hole to stick my head in while everyone else is struggling to deal with life in the wider world.  I come from the real world, and will die in the real world. I live there still.

When I woke up this morning, I found a dozen or so messages in my e-mail inbox from blog and book readers, most of whom have been in touch with me for years in one way or another. At first, I was puzzled as to why they were writing to me, I am no politician, I have no great medicines to dispense for fear and bewilderment.

I think they didn’t know  where else to go.

They were Americans, suddenly and for the first time afraid of our political campaign for President of the United States. There is much talk of empathy, and this week, I felt empathy for the other people in the world, so many have lived in fear from men without empathy for so long.  “I have never been so afraid for my country, or so disturbed about our future,” wrote Barbara, who has been reading my books and blog for some years now. She has always written me the most gentle and loving of messages.

“I am not a political person,” wrote Julia, “but I am having trouble sleeping, I am so saddened and disturbed the hatred and vitriol that is now so much a part of our wonderful country. I wake up every night, afraid of what might happen.” The messages went on and on like that, and it seemed to like the endless controversies  and media fever surrounding the election was frightening these people. It did not seem like my America.

One of the last messages was from a Syrian teenager who lost her mother and father in the Syrian civil war and managed to get into the United States with her only surviving sibling – three perished on their journey – and  before the hysteria over immigration.  She was afraid to give her full name.

Americans are not supposed to be afraid of who they are, that is for other countries. She hides her origins and her story, none of her neighbors know who she really is. The governor of her state seeks to ban refugees like her and says she shouldn’t be here. She lives with cousins who swear her to secrecy and also live in fear, behind closed curtains and locked doors.

She makes herself as small and invisible as possible, and is worried every day that she will be harmed or fired from her job in a fast-food franchise and sent back to the horror from which she escaped.

She was thanking me for something I wrote early about immigrants, it was posted on a website in Detroit, near where she lives.

“I accept the life of a refugee, but now, I fear, I will have to live the life of a criminal as well. I sometimes can hardly believe I am living in America.” Me too.

How awful to read these messages and feel as if I am drawn back to the memories and stories of my own family  before World War II, living in dread and fear as one politician after another in countries they always believed were civilized said things were unprecedented and unacceptable once, but were becoming a new kind of morality of evil.

Is it different? Sure. It is the same, sure? Americans should never be frightened of the elections that choose their leader, that in itself is a horror of its own.

It was Khizr and Ghazala Khan who seem to have brought all the fear and anger to a human scale that night in Philadelphia. He helped us to see that this is people we are talking about, and if we have no empathy for them, then we are capable of anything.

It was the Khans who challenged me to consider sacrifice and patriotism and what those two things mean to me.

Mr. Khan seems to have spoken to the soul of our country, of what it means to be an American. And to lose a son in service to defend the rest of us. Mr. Khan has shaken many of the people who have been anesthetized and hypnotized by the narrow thinking of left and right. He has awakened many,  and is asking us what it means to be moral men and women, can we step out of our smallness and figure out what the right thing is.

The left and right narrative has made it so easy for us to dismiss others. Oh, he’s on the left, she’s on the right. We don’t have to think of them or listen to them. The other is the enemy, we have nothing in common with them.

Mr. Khan has done what Joseph Welsh did. Simply by being a moral man, he exposed a kind of now ordinary evil, it was almost impossible not to see it, it was so stark and exposed.

Donald Trump has said and done many outrageous, and I would say, immoral,  things in this political campaign. I need to say something about it. I am not interested in joining the argument, but liberty – Mr. Khan reminded me of this – means not being afraid to say what you think and feel. If I can no longer do that, than my idea of America is dead.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about people like Donald Trump is not their politics, I don’t really think he has any, but that  that he seems utterly unaccountable for his lies and cruelty, there seems to be no limits for him, no penalty.  He has degraded us and a system that has worked for hundreds of years.

The more vicious and irresponsible he is, the louder the cheers for him. The bullies have  taken over one of the biggest school yards, they have frightened their classmates and lost their sense of decency. Bullies are the enemies of all us, however neglected we feel.

Good people tell me Donald Trump is the lesser of two evils, so everything he does is all right,  it was okay to rationalize his behavior and bigotry and utter lack of morality. To me, it is not that he is insane, rather that he is without empathy, just as Mr. Khan pointed out. In a leader, that is, of course, a terrifying thing. Because without empathy, the ability to stand in the shoes of another, how can one help anyone?

This is a man who believes building structures and creating jobs are sacrifices, akin to giving up your life for others or losing your child in a war.

Politically, as is becoming more and more obvious every day, the weakness of the argument that Donald Trump is the lesser of two evils is that those who choose the lesser evil seem to forget that they are choosing evil. Evil becomes the norm, the new standard, the bar is raised every day, with every speech. Evil is okay if it keeps us from being led by someone who disagrees with us sometimes. I don’t care to live in Iran.

Thus it seems moral to disagree with Trump on the one hand, but enabling him and supporting him on the other. One does not have to be a moral philosopher to know intuitively where that kind of rationalizing has led the modern world.

Khizr Khan is that rarest of creatures, the moral man. He not only grasps the right thing, he does the right thing.

When he took out his worn copy of the U.S. Constitution and waved it before Donald Trump, he transformed the narrative from just another stalemated argument between the left and the right where so many people are stuck, and into what it really is, a moral drama and choice of the highest order, speaking directly to the soul of a country founded on a very particular set of values. Who you support is not just about politics any more, who you choose is who you are.

The greatest evildoers are those without remembrance, they don’t remember evil because they have never thought about it, and without remembrance, they are without restraint or actual conscience. Nothing can hold them back. They are without conscience or self-awareness.

The greatest evil is not radical, or even political, it is not about ideology or political party. It has no  roots, is anchored to nothing, it exists in its own space. And because it has no roots, it  has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable and once unacceptable extremes. I remember seeing the bullies in my schoolyard cheered on and adored by their followers. It seemed to them a glorious and thrilling thing to toss aside the rules and restraints, to terrorize and intimidate.

There will always  be people like that, we can only pray they do not get to rule us.

Mr. Khan is a man of the rules, he lives by them and swears by them, he is above reproach, not an easy target for bullies and cowards.  He is not arguing for political victory, he is arguing for morality and a common sense of humanity. Perhaps this is because he has paid an ultimate sacrifice, he has lost his beloved son and understands loss and sacrifice in a way few of us can imagine. When you have lost what he has lost, you do not have as much to lose.

For some, attacking a person like this it is more than justifiable, it becomes a new kind of morality, an exhilarating liberation  from many of the constraints on human behavior, from the frustrations and disappointments of life. God save us from the rationalizers. I was forgotten and left behind, so I will do the same to you. I am the victim, there can really be no other victims, I can talk, so I never have to listen.

This is a position that is powerful and alluring in itself. There is no shame or regret, nothing to fear, no penalty we can pay, no mistakes to admit, no behavior too extreme, no point of view to understand, no empathy to feel.

Can a moral or rational mind really accept this as a noble trait in the most powerful leader in the world?

Mr. Khan, his partner and wife standing mournfully next to him, has emerged as that rarest of figure, the moral man. By his very existence, he exposes the true black heart of immorality, all he has to do is show up.

A philosopher once wrote that compassion is the foundation of morality. It is easy enough to see the moral men. And women.

Mr. Khan has no agenda, comes from no political place, he is not easily tagged by the “left”or the “right.” He loves Republicans and he loves Democrats, he loves anyone who is a symbol of democracy.  It is something of a wonder that in the midst of this awful turmoil, this season of fear and hate, he sees right into the very heart of what we fought to be about: liberty. Liberty for all.

The most poignant part of his plea was not to defeat Donald Trump, or  hate him. He begged for Trump’s family to sit him down and teach him empathy. He demanded that political leaders assume their moral responsibility.

I am especially grateful to him for he has given me the strength to speak up for myself and stand in my own truth.

My purpose is not to convince others, or to argue with them, but to satisfy myself. If he and his stricken wife can get up there on that stage and speak as sincerely and earnestly as they did, surely I can figure out, sitting on my farm, what it means to want to be a moral man, what it means to be a patriot for people like me.

It means empathy for others, for my daughter, for her daughter, coming to us soon. Empathy means imagining their lives, and protecting them from the greedy and the hateful, from the bullies of adult life. I have fewer days ahead of me than behind me, moral people look ahead to others.

There is a difference between understanding ethics and being a moral human being. It is one thing to see wrong, another to not do wrong. In my lifetime, our cultural and political values, our sense of commonality,  have never before been challenged in this way.

There has never seemed to be so much on the line. It is not that it is the worst of times, it is that we have such a strong choice about the times that will come.

Morality, writes the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, concerns the individual in his singularity. The criterion of right and wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do?

This is not something I can decide for you, or can resolve for you. It does not depend on the ideas and customs and habits of others, but on what I decide to do in regard to myself.

I cannot do certain things – I cannot vote for a person like Donald Trump or be silent about him  – because I would no longer be able to live with myself.  I can’t pretend on my wonderful farm with my beautiful wife and loving animals that this is not my business, or that it doesn’t matter here.

Living with myself is not a political statement, it is more than simple consciousness. It forms the very process of thought and love and life. It becomes who I actually am, how I  love, how I actually be.

To those good people messaging me in fear, I can’t really help you.

I can only say my wish for you is to stand strong, to do what you believe is the right thing.  Everything is a gift, and Donald Trump has helped me recover the power and feelings of that young boy going to see that amazing old documentary, as relevant today as it was then.

Thinking and remembering is the human way of striking roots, of finding love, of  empathy and compassion, of taking one’s place in a world into which we all arrive as strangers.There is always common ground.

We can only seek our own moral personality. If I am a thinking being, rooted in memory and thought and the wish to be good, knowing that I have to live with myself every remaining day, then there will be limits to what I can permit myself to do. If I am not a thinking or remembering human being, there are none.

This is what Mr. Khan did, the gift he gave to me. He asked me and you and Donald Trump and everyone watching to ask themselves if, at long last, they still had any sense of decency. He stirred my heart, just as Joseph Welsh did so many years ago.

Liberty for all.