After observing the tenor of public life in recent weeks, I have found myself reflecting not on any single event, but on the broader condition of our civic conversation. Disagreement is not new to this country; it is, in fact, one of its founding conditions. What is new is the degree to which our disagreements now occur in isolation - fragmented, reactive, and often unmoored from shared standards of deliberation or mutual responsibility.

 

At earlier moments of national strain, Americans confronted division not by retreating into silence or shouting past one another, but by committing themselves to sustained correspondence. Long before independence was declared, communities across the colonies formed what became known as the COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE - networks of citizens who wrote, read, debated, and transmitted concerns with care and discipline. These committees did not wield force. They wielded words, memory, and accountability.

 

Their purpose was not unanimity. It was coherence. They sought to ensure that grievances were understood accurately, that principles were articulated clearly, and that local concerns were connected to a broader moral and civic framework. In doing so, they preserved something essential: a shared language of responsibility that made later collective action intelligible and restrained.

 

Today, our institutions remain intact, our laws operative, and our elections ongoing. Yet the connective tissue of civic understanding has weakened. Information travels faster than reflection. Reaction often replaces correspondence. In such an environment, misunderstanding multiplies, trust erodes, and fear fills the vacuum left by dialogue.

 

A renewed commitment to civic correspondence would not challenge lawful authority, nor would it bypass existing institutions. Rather, it would complement them by restoring a culture of deliberate communication - citizens writing to citizens, communities explaining themselves to one another, and concerns being documented with seriousness rather than spectacle. This is not radical. It is profoundly conservative in the deepest sense of the word: conserving the habits that allow a republic to govern itself without tearing itself apart.

 

The original committees understood that legitimacy depends not only on power, but on explanation; not only on enforcement, but on consent informed by reason. They recognized that when citizens cease to speak with one another, they will eventually be spoken over by forces far less accountable.

 

Reviving this practice today need not replicate its eighteenth-century form. It can take place through letters, structured forums, inter-community councils, and disciplined channels of exchange that privilege clarity over volume and substance over outrage. What matters is not the medium, but the ethic: patience, accuracy, moral seriousness, and an assumption of good faith until proven otherwise.

 

This is not a call to relitigate the past endlessly, nor to inflame the present. It is an appeal to memory. Our forebears understood that when societies drift toward fracture, the first repair must occur in communication - careful, principled, and shared. Before there were declarations or congresses, there were letters.

 

In a moment when many feel unheard, misunderstood, or reduced to caricature, correspondence offers a disciplined alternative to both silence and shouting. It reminds us that citizenship is not merely a status, but a practice - one that requires effort even when agreement is unlikely.

 

A republic cannot be sustained by force alone, nor by sentiment untethered from responsibility. It endures when its citizens take seriously the work of explaining themselves to one another, and when disagreement is met not with erasure, but with reply.

 

Perhaps it is time we remembered that before we were a nation of declarations, we were a nation of correspondents.

 

After spending the afternoon reading over various events occurring over last few weeks, I felt compelled to put some thoughts down for my own personal reflection and record.

 

When I observe the events occurring within our nation, I find myself returning not to slogans or arguments, but to first principles. Every society depends on authority, order, and law. Yet every society is also judged by how it exercises power when fear enters the equation; when those with authority confront those who are frightened, desperate, or running away. History suggests that these moments, more than any others, reveal who we truly are.

 

I have served as a soldier, lived as a citizen under the rule of law, and committed myself to moral obligations shaped by long traditions, including those taught in Freemasonry. None of these roles grants moral exemption. In fact, each imposes a higher standard. They share a common lesson: authority without restraint is not strength; it is failure.

 

Military service teaches quickly that discipline is not synonymous with force. The most demanding form of discipline is restraint - the ability to govern oneself under stress, uncertainty, and fear. Anyone can act when adrenaline surges. Far fewer can pause, assess, and choose the course that preserves both life and honor. That restraint is not weakness; it is the defining mark of professionalism and moral maturity.

 

Citizenship carries a similar burden. Laws are necessary. Institutions are necessary. Without them, society fractures. But law has never existed in a moral vacuum. Across time and cultures, humanity has learned, often painfully, that legality alone does not sanctify action. When enforcement becomes detached from conscience, order may be maintained temporarily, but justice is quietly dismantled. The record of history is clear: “I was following the law” has never been enough to absolve cruelty.

 

Moral traditions - religious, philosophical, and civic - converge on a strikingly consistent principle: the powerful are accountable for how they treat the vulnerable. The frightened person, the outsider, the one trying to escape harm; these figures appear repeatedly as moral tests. They are not convenient tests, and they are rarely comfortable ones. But they exist precisely because ethics matter most when circumstances tempt us to abandon them.

 

Modern humanitarian institutions did not emerge by accident. They were born from collective recognition that unchecked authority leads to atrocity. Aid organizations, relief agencies, and codes of conduct exist to remind societies that order and humanity are not opposites. Their purpose is not to undermine law, but to ensure that law does not consume the very values it claims to defend.

 

The danger facing any society is not disagreement over policy; it is moral drift. When fear becomes justification, when power begins to excuse harm to the powerless, the boundary between protection and cruelty erodes. Once that erosion begins, it rarely stops where its defenders expect. Violence rationalized today as “necessary” has a way of reappearing tomorrow as “regrettable,” and later as “indefensible.”

 

This is not a call for disorder, nor a denial of the complexity of governance. It is a reminder that authority is always conditional; conditional on restraint, proportionality, and respect for human dignity. Strength that cannot distinguish between control and cruelty is not strength at all. Order purchased at the cost of conscience is unsustainable.

 

For those who believe themselves to be good citizens, honorable professionals, or moral people, this moment invites reflection rather than accusation. What do our commitments demand of us when fear is present and power is unequal? Do our values apply only when it is easy to uphold them, or especially when it is not?

 

If our principles fail precisely when people are afraid, fleeing, or powerless, then they are not principles, they are preferences. And societies built on preferences rather than obligations eventually lose both their moral authority and their stability.

 

The measure of a nation, like the measure of a person, is not found in how forcefully it can act, but in how faithfully it restrains itself. That is where law earns legitimacy, service retains honor, and moral commitments prove they are more than words.