The Decency Doctrine

“I have one goal in life, and that’s to raise my children to be decent human beings,” 44-year-old Little Elm, Texas resident Ashley Irish told a group of about 75 guests aboard a luncheon cruise on the Marco Island Princess on Friday, June 6.

Choking back tears, she turned her comments and her attention to the assembled crowd. “For the past week,” she said, “everyone on this boat and in this community has shown my children what decency, kindness, and generosity is. You’ve been role models for what I want them to become, and I’m forever grateful for that.”  

Irish is a breast cancer survivor, one of 11 who attended the 2025 Little Pink Houses of Hope breast cancer retreat with their families on Marco this June 1-7. She brought her three kids and her mom with her for the week, as her husband couldn’t get the time off work. Her comments came during the wrap-up lunch aboard the Princess, which included all the retreat families and more than 25 volunteers and Marco Island supporters and donors. It’s always an emotional affair as the families all take turns recounting their favorite parts of the retreat week, many describing how the experience changed their lives.

If I had to guess, I think Ashley’s sentiments sprang directly from the existential threat she and her family are facing as they continue the fight of their young lives. When you’re staring down cancer and all the life obstacles it can throw in your way, sometimes the only thing you can hope for is plain, human decency.

The powerful thing about Irish’s comments is how directly they tied her family’s retreat experience to her children evolving into decent human beings through proximity to good role models. That’s pretty enlightened.

And embedded in her sentiments, I think, is an even more powerful but unstated concept, specifically that our true role models for decency are right in front of us, every day, and not in our institutions and leaders, who are showing a glaring lack of decency on a near-daily basis.

The tough thing about using the word “decency” as a guidepost for collective human behavior is its lack of specificity about what decency actually looks like in action.

The official definition of decency is “behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality and respectability.” I think you know where I’m going with this...

How do we know what’s moral and respectable when the accepted standards of each are getting contorted and twisted into unrecognizable versions of their former selves by the very officials we elect to serve in part as our country’s moral compasses?

Among many of our elected leaders, morality, decency, and respectability have been jettisoned for anger, vengeance, name-calling, and retribution, and it’s coming at a time when our society is facing some of its biggest tension points in decades.

This summer is shaping up to be both tumultuous and potentially dark, in my opinion. Ahead on the horizon: ramped up immigration actions, which translate to increased protests, which invite the potential for increased violence and more aggressive government intervention on our nation’s streets; a contentious and polarizing tax and spending reconciliation bill winding its way through Congress, and with it, a robust debate over our ballooning national debt; tariff-related price increases and product shortages that are likely to escalate in the weeks and months ahead; wars in Ukraine and Gaza that show no meaningful signs of slowing down; potential disruptions to critical public services resulting from the downstream effects of DOGE’s scattershot cost-cutting.

In short, we could use a little decency when it comes to our public discourse and our actions toward each other in the weeks and months ahead. I guarantee we won’t be getting that decency from our leaders, which makes it all the more important for us to model it in our local communities, as humans interacting with each other.

Call it “The Decency Doctrine.” And we can all thank Ashley for her wisdom, which is the by-product of true personal adversity, not the contrived adversity that fuels much of our public discourse.