Thursday, July 16, 2009
Sanford could still be a hero
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
- Seeing racism where it's not
- Skeptics or traitors?
- School freedom is elusive
- Murder can't be an option
From the RoundTable blog
Two famous Southern men. Two secret mistresses. Two devastated wives. Two sets of four betrayed sons. What sad and similar legacies Mark Sanford and Steve McNair created for themselves.
The difference: Sanford, if he's man enough to do it, may yet have a chance to redeem his legacy. For McNair, and the young mistress who took his life and then her own, the time for second chances is gone.
However tragic his death, though, McNair was not a "victim of American gun culture" as the headline of a New York Daily News article ("Steve McNair's famous face becomes just another victim of American gun culture," July 6) by Mike Lupica put it.
If McNair was a victim of any aspect of American culture, it was the self-indulgent, sex-inundated aspect that encourages us to define ourselves primarily by our sexual desires and others primarily as the means to fulfilling them.
McNair wasn't even Sahel Kazemi's victim. If anything, as a 20-year-old woman nearly young enough to be McNair's daughter, she was his. The truth is, Steve McNair -- like Mark Sanford -- was the victim of a personal choice to indulge his own desires at the expense of his family, his public reputation and, in McNair's case, ultimately his life.
According to MercuryNews.com ("Sports digest: McNair's pastor asks others to 'drop your stone,'" July 9), at McNair's funeral, Bishop Joseph W. Walker III urged attendees not to judge McNair. "Drop your stone," he said, referring to the biblical account of the woman taken in adultery and Jesus' admonition that the one without sin should cast the first stone.
Walker's words have some merit. We're all fallen human beings living in a fallen world. None of us is without sin, and none should stand in self-righteous judgment of McNair's sins just because, by the grace of God, his particular sins aren't our own.
But neither should we gloss over McNair's sins in an effort to avoid the error Mark Antony describes in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." "The evil that men do lives after them," Antony says in Caesar's funeral oration, "the good is oft interred with their bones."
When a man is talented enough or famous enough or admired enough, though, like McNair, our error tends more often in the opposite direction. We keep the good alive and inter the bad.
Acknowledging the good McNair did is a fine thing; lauding him as some sort of victimized hero is not. Real heroes don't make the choices McNair -- and Sanford -- made. Unlike McNair and Sanford, real heroes are characterized by self-sacrifice. These are the men who give up their own desires for the welfare of their families. They're the men who honor the vows they made to their wives -- even when temptation beckons -- and honor the wives to whom they made those vows.
Real heroes know love is not so much an emotion as it is an action -- not something a man falls into, but something he does. Real heroes not only attend their kids' football games, as high school coach Nevil Barr said McNair loved to do, they also attend to their kids' trust.
Real heroes set a good example for their sons. They show them, by their own lives, how to be trustworthy men, as well as good husbands and fathers. Real heroes don't take the easy way out; they stick around when life gets tough. They know only too well that what looks like the easy way seldom is.
McNair is gone. The good he did will live after him, but so, too, will the heartache he caused. His wife is left to grieve not only her dead husband but also her shattered trust. His sons will have to grow up without their dad and without the love and guidance a real hero could have given them. Sanford is fortunate. If he can pull himself together and act like a man, he still has a shot at becoming a real hero to his wife and kids.
But that can happen only if Sanford is willing to relinquish his "soul mate" and to promise his family, in the words of a Trace Adkins song, "there'll be no [more] me, myself, and I."
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
