October 24, 2025- Talk is cheap

For action is, indeed, the sole medium of expression for ethics.

~Jane Addams

Talk is cheap. It is easy to preach from a lectern of moral superiority. It is also easy to then walk away from that lectern to perform acts that betray our words.

Our inability to align our intentions, our words, and our actions make us human. No human being has the discipline to align those components perfectly at all times. We tend to consider morality to be a deep character trait that is largely fixed. Some of us are just good people, while others are not. In reality, how many people are truly steeped in bad intentions?

Isn’t it more likely that most people intend to do good things and can’t? Either they lack the wisdom and insight to know what true goodness really looks like, or they lack the discipline to execute good intentions.

There are so many reasons why people act the way they do, and we understand very few of them. Perhaps we can make a habit of leading with grace? Maybe we can stop pretending that it is fully within any person’s capacity to go do good all the time? Maybe we can start to acknowledge that there is good and evil in each of us, and our job is simply to expose our goodness as often as possible?