Stateville Daily
Charlotte police shot and seriously wounded a young man who was admittedly the proprietor of a liquor laden car, and who was attempting a get-away when the police bullets caught him. There is quite a warm argument about the shooting. The young man says he was running away—“running away from disgrace”—he is quoted as saying, when the officers fired on him and hit him in the back. The wound shows that he was shot in the back. The police say the rum-runner was on the run, but that he stopped long enough to open fire on them, or fired as he ran. In any event the minions of the law are declaring vehemently that they didn’t stage the shooting; that the rum-runner opened the engagement with a salutation of hot lead and they answered in kind. They say they have his gun as evidence. Rum-runner says he had no gun.
Leaving that dispute for settlement with those charged with the responsibility, let us reflect for a moment on what that young man says he was running away from. He had he admits, a quantity of liquor in his car, and when the officers pressed him he abandoned the car and used his feet, of not his head. He was, he says “running away from disgrace.” If the officers hadn’t come upon him he wouldn’t have run away. There would have been no “disgrace,” nor nothing, to run from. Then we must assume that, as the rum runner sees it, the disgrace impended only when the possibility of capture pressed. It was the disgrace of being caught that alarmed and lent wings to his feet; the disgrace of exposure. So far as appears it was not disgrace, as the rum-runner viewed it, to be engaged in rum running; or at least it was not the sort of disgrace that he would run away from. He would have stayed on that job, profited from it, without sufficient disturbance of conscience to cause loss of sleep if the police had let him alone. He saw only disgrace in exposure and punishment.
Of course that idea of disgrace did not originate with this rum runner. It is as old as the race, as old as time. It is very human to do things we don’t care to have known. These things may be morally wrong, or legally wrong; sometimes they are neither. But while we have the courage to go ahead and do them, we have a great dread, sometimes an unreasonable fear, of certain of our acts becoming public. If the things we do are not morally or legally wrong, simply contrary to custom; if they are things we can justify and defend, then we should have the courage to do them in the open. If we knowingly and willfully violate the legal and moral code, and feel that exposure means disgrace, why does it not occur to us that the disgrace begins with the wrong conduct? While we may not suffer so much from the consequences, the disgrace is not one whit less if the evil conduct is never discovered. The wrong is just as great, just as hideous—if it is of a character to make it hideous—and the moral responsibility is just the same, as if no exposure should be made. One is regarded as an outstanding specimen of moral depravity if he is “open in his meanness,” if he doesn’t seem to care who knows. But it may be doubted if he is as bad, certainly he is no worse than he who engaged in wrong practices freely and willfully, and then protests to heaven that he is disgraced with exposure faces. Certainly he is disgraced, but to his infamy he added the sin of hypocrisy when he was pretending to be what he was not.
Folks are certainly curious that way. Every newspaper man knows the frantic efforts made to keep things out of the paper that affect personal reputation. And every newspaper man has been made sick with disgust at the whited sepulchers who were full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness, morally rotten and content to be so, who put up a whine about their reputations being hurt when exposure comes to them. There are persons not a few in every community who have had reputations but profess not to realize it. They may be known as bootlegger patrons, known to be unscrupulous in their dealings, but they make presence of good reputation and so long as no open exposure comes, although their rottenness is well known if not generally known, they get by. But these very people, if and when exposure comes, are as frantic in the effort to hide as if they were really clean. They profess to fear disgrace, when they have been disgraced all along by their own voluntary acts. A lot of folks think they have somebody fooled when they haven’t. They may be favored of fortune so that exposure is avoided, but the disgrace is just as rank and lack of confidence as great among those who know them.
From page 3 of The Concord Daily Tribune, Wednesday, April 7, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-04-07/ed-1/seq-3/
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