As one who has labored for so much of his life to make the right choices in life, and to know what they are, I’ve come to believe that the foundation of my happiness and well-being is the moral choices I make and the confidence, dignity and self-respect it takes for me to make them.

I was at a restaurant the other day and a young child, I think he was six or seven, wanted some ice cream. and his parents said no. The boy picked up what was left of his soup and threw it in his mother’s face, splattering it all over her and her clothes.

I was startled by this, and even more so by the mother and father’s response.

She said she was sorry he couldn’t  have his ice cream, but it was “a poor decision” to throw it at her, now he didn’t have any left to eat. The father said “let’s get him the ice cream,” he’s going to scream all the way home in the car. The mother agreed, and ordered some ice cream for her son.

The parent’s response bothered me, not because they weren’t tough enough, but rather that they just taught his son something he already seemed to know: they had forfeited their own dignity and self-respect, something I would never surrender to my daughter, and I am no hard ass disciplinarian from the old school.

If you read the news at all, you are perhaps frightened and alarmed at how much contempt there is for traditional notions of morality. Lying is okay, sexual harassment is okay, cruelty is okay. What happened to moral choices?

For me, the lesson for that boy wasn’t that he wasted some of his soup, but that he had made the wrong choice when confronted with not being able to get something he wanted. What a missed opportunity, I thought, to teach him something he really needed to know, even if he didn’t want to  hear it.

He had learned that he could rob someone of their dignity, and it was okay. Why wouldn’t it happen again and again? It wasn’t a failure of obedience, but of morals. It is wrong to treat people in that way.

The couple behind us leaned over and whispered that “this is the way kids are these days, all the parents are like this.” I don’t know about that, I consider things-were-much-better-in the old days to be another form of old talk, and  I don’t do old talk.

I’ve been thinking about the moral choices we do or don’t make since I saw that scene, and eventually I went where I always go: to the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt.

I think it was her writing- and some powerful lessons of life – that helped me to own and define the moral choices. Without the confidence and clarity to make good choices – and moral ones – I wallowed in fear and confusion.

The inability to understand how to make choices was, I was to learn, the fuel that anxiety depends on to thrive and grow.

For me, the problem wasn’t that the child was disobedient, I’ve never been impressed much by obedient people, total obedience is for cows and some dogs. The problem was immorality, they were teaching their son that it was okay to be immoral, to treat other people in an immoral way.

That failure, wrote Arendt, it what can lead to so much violence and suffering and hatred in our world.

It is immoral to treat people in the way the boy mistreated his parents, to humiliate them and deny them respect. Where is this child supposed to take that lesson?

Arendt wrote that moral conduct seems to depend primarily on the discourse between a man or woman and themselves. He must not contradict himself by making exceptions and rationalizations in  his own favor.

He must never put himself in a position where he would have to despise himself.

And if I ever threw food in my mother’s face without challenge or regret, I believe the seeds of self-loathing would have started to sprout right away. Some part of me would have despised myself.

As messed up as I was, I know at the earliest age that such a thing would be wrong, that it was not right. And I stole money from my mother’s purse almost every other day. I didn’t know it was wrong. I just chose my own needs over hers.

Perhaps I’m drawing straws.

This is the standard for moral conduct, Arendt wrote:

The standard is not a matter of concern with the other, but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity, and even human pride. The standard is neither the love of some neighbors and relatives, nor self-love, but self-respect. The moral law, if it exists at all, exists inside of me, not outside of me or in the judgment of other people.

The idea is to please me, not you or anyone else. The idea is self-respect.

Moral law and moral choice has nothing do with obedience to any law or religion, wrote Arendt. Legality is morally neutral, and every Church is a church of sinners.

She said the  devil makes the best theologian. What  cannot be punished is permitted.

We are the legislators, she wrote, sin or crime or cruelty can no longer be defined as disobedience to somebody else’s law, “but on the contrary as refusal to act my part as legislator of the world.”

When I understood my first marriage had failed,  I think I made the first significant moral choice of my life. I called my wife up and talked to her honestly and openly and said our marriage had collapsed, and we needed to live apart. I couldn’t  lie any longer, it was wrong.

I had hidden this feeling for years thinking it was compassionate. It wasn’t, it was just immoral to live this way.  It was just wrong.

I’ve read a lot about moral choices since my awful decision to break up my family. The historians say the idea of moral conduct – nobility, dignity, steadfastness, and a kind of laughing courage – has remained essentially the same throughout the centuries. We behave differently, but the idea of moral conduct is more or less the sam.

In the nineteen thirties, before the horrors of the coming war were even imagined,  Winston Churchill wrote this: Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was impossible,  has happened.”

But his own idea of right and wrong didn’t change. Morality is an enduring  thing, the idea of it has really not changed through the centuries. And Churchill made the biggest moral choices one could make.

I have been thinking about moral law and moral conduct because everything I see or read or hear was right and noble, seems under challenge and being rejected by great numbers of people. We all have moral choices to make, we all have to figure out how to make them.

For me, there are  no big moral choices or small ones in my life. They are all big, they all matter.

Much of what I believe is being challenged or rejected, often with contempt. But something is different. I like the man I see looking back at me in the mirror. I own my moral choices, I support them.

Gandhi said the good guys always win, that love and good always triumph in the end.

I guess I believe that.

So I’ve decided again and again in this vein that I won’t term my values into an argument for other people to make, or for me to agonize and panic over. It is so much better to do good than to argue about what good is.