Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue

1. Invisible Heroes: Mad about MADD

3 1 Invisible Heroes: Mad about MADD Twenty years ago the thirteen-year-old daughter of suburban California housewife Candy Lightner was killed by a drunk driver. Mrs. Lightner was distraught to learn that the driver had been on the road despite having an extensive record of driving while intoxicated. Rather than simply wallow in her grief and anger, she founded an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving—MADD. The group’s membership grew not only by the addition of others who had lost children but also by an appeal to mothers as such. Currently, more than 400 chapters of MADD volunteers work within all fifty states and countless smaller localities. The organization operates at multiple levels of community: sponsoring educational initiatives in schools to prevent children from growing up to become adults who drink and drive; participating in driver re-education programs for drivers who have been disciplined or put on probation; pressing local media for coverage of drunk driving; and lobbying for state and national legislation to make the penalties for drunk driving more severe. The relationship between the work of MADD and reductions in drunk driving fatalities has been publicly acknowledged. For example, in October 2000, when President Bill Clinton signed legislation mandating lower maximum blood alcohol levels to establish drunk driving, he credited the work of MADD.1 On the face of it, there is something heroic about the work of MADD, something heroic about the transformation of a personal tragedy to public service in its history.2 MADD is but one of many grassroots movements in 4 · Mad about MADD which personal experience is nobly turned outward for the benefit of the community at large. The Anti-Defamation League—an organization that like MADD is the subject of a case study at the conclusion of this book— draws upon Jewish experience of genocidal anti-Semitism in the Holocaust to create public educational programs against all group hates. When former First Lady Betty Ford made her personal struggle against substance abuse a public story, she embodied the commitment of preexisting community organizations and also spawned new ones. In these organizations, former substance abusers offer support to recovering addicts as well as community education on substance abuse prevention and treatment. Public mentoring of the experienced to the inexperienced occurs when someone who has struggled with mental illness (or supported an affected love one) works a late-night shift on a mental-health-emergency hotline, when parents surprised to learn that their son or daughter is homosexual receive social support at a meeting of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), or the La Leche League sends an experienced nurser to the home of a new mother who has requested breast-feeding assistance. The list of people, movements, and organizations that convert personal moral experience into constructive public capital could go on and on. Yet the heroism of MADD and groups like it seems invisible in current discussions of civic virtue. Paradoxically, these discussions almost universally lament a perceived loss of civic virtue that is associated with losses of public civility and civic-mindedness, a family of related terms. Thus a mythological narrative of “the Fall” underlies current writing on civic virtue. The Fall Narrative of Civic Virtue Social commentators participating in the fall narrative speculate on how we lost the civic virtue of some earlier golden age and they challenge us to recapture it. Significantly, the fall narrative is presumed by writers with perspectives from different fields—sociologists, political theorists, religious studies scholars. It is equally presumed by thinkers who otherwise occupy very different positions on the political spectrum or who are variously labeled by political theorists as “liberals,” “communitarians,” “civic republicans,” or “cultural conservatives.” Most straightforwardly, the “fall” Invisible Heroes · 5 is perceived as an actual fall in levels of civic virtue among the citizenry. Alternatively, the fall is described as a retreat from public discourse about civic virtue—a retreat that, it is feared, will inevitably erode civic virtue itself. The following excerpts from contemporary literature demonstrate the rhetorical force of the fall narrative. Alasdair MacIntyre’s aptly titled After Virtue laments the modern underappreciation of how cultivated virtues shape moral life, dramatically equating the fall from virtue with a new Dark Ages (MacIntyre 1984, 263). In their national best-seller Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues claim: Madison and the other founders [believed] our form of government...