According to the Rules Back Home – Sunday, January 11, 1942
What is happening to us these days is rather readily explained in sociological and economic and statistical terminology. We read of population displacement, of labor scarcities, of abandoned towns and industries, of old homes forsaken, of new housing projects, of young men inducted, and of many sweeping changes, according to the need and expediency of the hour. But illuminating as such statistical facts are, what isn’t apparent in these broad, sweeping summaries, is what is happening to people, inside themselves, in their personal lives. This, no statistical report can possibly reveal, and no general statement can possibly describe, with full meaning.
What happens when young people from sheltered homes, with friends, relatives, traditions, familiar surroundings and a well-ordered environment are suddenly uprooted—to find themselves among strangers, with every physical pattern of life, of necessity changed? What happens inside, under these conditions? Well, different things happen to different people, depending upon how well grounded they were to begin with. But to all those who, of necessity, go from place to place for employment, for education, for new opportunities, or who are moved according to the fortunes of war, certainly this much should be said: Fundamentally there is only one set of rules. If a thing wasn’t right or ethical at home, it isn’t right or ethical away from home.
If a thing wasn’t sound morally or spiritually where we came from, it isn’t sound morally or spiritually where we’re going. Some day when all this has passed, most of us are going to want to go back to those places from which we have come, and take up life where we left it, as nearly as we can under changed circumstances, and in anticipation of this—or whether we want to go back or not, for that matter—it is well to keep in mind that we don’t change our identity when we change our environment.
We can’t change color, like the chameleon, and expect to change quickly back again. The colors of character tend to resist ready change—especially changes from the darker to the lighter hues. And so, through all of these shifting scenes, with all this uprooting and much moving from place to place, remember that back home there was a set of rules, and if a thing wasn’t right fundamentally where we came from it isn’t right any place.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, January 11, 1942, over Radio Station KSL and the Nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1942.
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January 11, 1942
Broadcast Number 0,647