Here's a brief history lesson I learned lastnight. Apparently, there were more than just the 13 virtues of Benjamin Franklin that I'd grown up learning about. Franklin as a young man compiled a list of personal "great virtues" to which he planned to dedicate himself, listed in his autobiography - but these I'd never encountered on that list. Might these be mis-attributed? Somehow, I doubt that most anyone inside the parking garage where this sign hangs could readily have told me true.
A quick Google search hasn't returned much in the way of enlightenment, so I'm just going to run with it. And being that it's Sunday and I'm not feeling particularly imbued with the quality of perceptiveness, I'm going to avoid any diatribes about politics. Instead, just think on how remarkable it is that these humanistic attributes - not branding themselves to any tenets of a specific party - are still viable. I suppose in those days the party system as we know it would have seemed completely backwards if defined only by its stances. But the social culture of the United States has also changed a lot in a little over 200 years, and so the wisdom regarding what it means to be a human being here, in addition to just being a citizen here, seem more or less straight forward. Nice to know we haven't gone too far off the deep end.
Just don't go back 400 years, because then all of these more or less to go shit with the advent of European conquest of the North American continent. Guns and germs and steel, oh my!