“With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,”

A neglected phrase from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It follows “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Some quotations even omit it, but when I first saw it on a monument at Gettysburg, it grabbed my attention and still hasn’t let go.

Lincoln spoke in the language of the conventional pietism of his time. He wasn’t talking about tables of rules to be followed by rote. A person who was confident that he had all the answers couldn’t have written those words. He understood morality as a dynamic process in which we struggle to make moral decisions and perform moral actions and hopefully get better at it.

I think the Great Emancipator was also the Great Humanist.

I will hereby give each of you [pro-death-penalty conservaclone honkers]  $1 million if you agree that we will not kill this insane, murderous criminal, and instead just let him rot in prison for the rest of his life without a chance of parole. A million bucks, all for you. Or, we kill him, waste the $30 million [it takes on average to execute a prisoner] and you get nothing.

Do you know how many would accept? Of course you do. All of them. Which means, for most, support of the death penalty is no serious moral conviction at all; it’s merely an ugly, black hunk of reactionary spittle, the bleak human vengeance synapse writ large, something reptilian and small and just about as far from our often hypocritical concepts of God and forgiveness, compassion and understanding, as you can possibly get.

This dream has hung around long enough for me to speculate on what caused it. I’ve been getting calls from headhunters, sometimes about very attractive jobs. I always tell them very nicely that I won’t be able to accept jobs having to do with weapon systems, and when they ask — they always ask — I say it’s for religious reasons. Can atheists have religious reasons? Maybe I’m not telling the precise truth. Well, I’m not inflating my résumé. I don’t do that: Even if I did, I’m awful at lying, so I’d be busted before I opened my backpack. But I don’t much care if a technical missstatement results in my not getting a job I’ll probably hate.

Oh yeah, the dream. Training devices usually come in bunches: full flight sim, cockpit procedures trainer, panel trainers that demostrate the functionality of various aircraft systems in classrooms, maintenance trainers) The training device I was shaking down was a Moral Readiness Trainer. Trainees would enter the cockpit and be tested on their moral readiness to assume duties in the military.

There’s a pun there: there’s a part of most simulators’ code and accompanying procedures called morning readiness. It’s a sanity check on your system so the customer doesn’t try to train flight crew on a broken simulator I once wrote the code for morning readiness for a system that went into space and was subject to radiation that could screw up the contents of RAM and the contents of the flash drives where the software was stored. Kind of an interesting problem, but it was accepted and went into space. Unfortunately the system was installed in the Spektr module of Mir, which ran into an accident with a provisioning rocket, so my software was briefly in space. I suspect the vacuum let the magic smoke out of some of the parts. Eventually my system crashed, into the ocean.

So here we were in the Moral Readiness Trainer cockpit and we were under heavy fire and shells were bursting everywhere So some of my students got up and rescued some people and took them to the aid station. It wasn’t on my lesson plan. It doesn’t need to be.

There were motive, means, and opportunity to strike back at the enemy, I told my trainees that placing their own lives at risk to save others was fine, but, while they could make up their own minds about this, I personally wouldn’t recommend using violence.I told my students that I wouldn’t use my rank to force my decision on them, but they should make up their own minds. And if they’d had a religious upbringing that stressed obedience, they might have some trouble with that, but they should figure out what’s right and wrong by themselves and do the best they could.

These trainees didn’t look up at me with doe-eyed reverence. I wasn’t a hero, not even in my own dream. I looked up to them. They were like every young military man or woman I’d ever met: bright, eager to serve their country, and eager to learn how to fulfill their mission.

O thus be it ever when free people shall stand

Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.

Let’s remember them and the real people in our armed services this Memorial Day and hope they all make the right choices and come back safe and well.