As the title for this blog suggests, the essence of life is represented in the integrity of individuals. For, according to our Founding Fathers, they feel it is one of the most important virtue our country can have and it’s one of the foundations upon which our Constitution was written and our country was founded upon. John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and second president of the United States, said that without preserving our national integrity our democracy and republic will not survive, so obviously, it’s what our politicians, our public servants should keep in the forefront of their minds, from one political day to the next.

In my book What Would Our Founding Father’s Say?:How Today’s Leaders Lost Their Way, I have a whole chapter entitled Politics and Integrity. I introduce the chapter by saying that by putting politics and Integrity together on the same page may seem like an oxymoron, since they mean the opposite of each other, like the expression deafening silence; in that sense, they seem like oil and water, they don’t mix! Aren’t they contradictory terms?

Well they don’t have to be antithetical to one another. Obviously, it’s not the terms that need fixing, it’s the politician that needs “tweaking.” If we do that, those seemingly contradictory terms can work side by side in perfect unison to further our nation’s goals.

But before we go any further, let’s define what we mean by integrity in both a political and personal sense. Our  Founding Fathers felt that political and personal integrity can and should be used interchangeably. If you don’t have personal integrity, you don’t have political integrity.  They felt that the newly written Constitution was founded upon the four foundations of freedom, two of which was private and public virtue.

In Chapter 5 of my book, I talk about private virtue as referring to “… each citizen’s responsibility for being a person of integrity.”  I further state in the book, “This means , in order for a country that is free to hold itself together, every person – particularly every leader – is mandated to develop and follow his or her own moral compass, which includes following his or her heart and serving his or her family and others in a responsible and compassionate way.”

Public virtue speaks to the need a democratic republic has for its citizenry to voluntarily sacrifice personal benefit for something greater than themselves. To be willing to put aside their selfish interests for the greater good of society.

Consistent with what I said earlier, Adams spoke of the link between the first and second foundation by stating, “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.”

In a future blog, I will show how our integrity at both the individual and national level continues to be bruised and battered because of either out of ignorance or willful intent,  our politicians continue to not choose to make legislative choices based on sound national principles as stated in our Constitution, whereby the rights and principles of ALL Americans, when possible, are consistently responded to and eventually made into law. Instead, those needs are ignored, in favor of meeting the politicians’ needs or that of the needs of their party in which they are a member.