How impeachment sullied our American values

Have you ever tried to buy a newspaper or a magazine from one of those curbside vending boxes in NYC? They're tough. They're impregnable. If the French had merely extended their Maginot Line across Belgium and protected it half as well as those newspaper vending boxes are protected, the Germans would never have broken through, and we would have been spared Dunkirk and Britain Stands Alone.

I remember, as a young boy growing up in North Carolina, how we, too, had curbside newspaper vending boxes. But the strength and architecture of those pitiful efforts bore scant comparison to what we have today. We had the latest copies of The Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro Record exposed in little racks that looked like they were made from bent coat hangers.

And the coins! Back then, in North Carolina, there was a naked paper coffee cup grafted onto the side of the bent coat hanger cage, and we were encouraged to place our coins therein. Throughout the day, the pile of newspapers shrank and those coins piled up, for all to see and for anyone to steal.

But the newspapers and the coins were protected, and not by some armor-plated device worthy of Fort Knox.

I ask you not to be impressed at these early American values simply because nobody ever stole the coins or a newspaper. I ask you to be impressed at the fact that the thought never even occurred to anyone to steal a newspaper or the coins. They were protected by conscience, by what we called "the honor system." They were protected by our collective sense of decorum, decency and propriety.

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Women and girls were similarly protected. They were exalted creatures who commanded unfathomable respect. You were always quick to say "Yes, Ma'am" or "No, Ma'am." You never used coarse language in front of women or girls. There was an ongoing argument that split the male vote in two. One faction held that it was OK to use swear words in front of females, because they wouldn't even know what you were saying. What to you was clear profanity was, to girls, nothing but a gobbledegook of jabberwocky. The other side warned, "Don't be too sure. They know all the words we know, and then some!"

These are just a couple of examples of American values. But the most dramatic change in those values was something most of us witnessed just recently.

Would somebody please call and tell me who exemplified those American values – even slightly – during the impeachment imbroglio?