By John Krull TheStatehouseFile.com  INDIANAPOLIS – My Republican friend was so certain. “Impeachment will backfire on the Democrats,” he said. “Just like it did on us when we tried it with Clinton.” My friend isn’t the only one who thinks that way. Many of his fellow Republicans and more than a few Democrats feel that […]

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Maybe, in the end, human decency will save us.

A liberal writer named Nicole Cliffe has come under criticism for making a $2,800 contribution to the presidential campaign of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Why?

Well, Cliffe is far to the left of Buttigieg, who is positioning himself as a centrist Democrat. In fact, she supports U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, for the party’s nomination — and has given Warren’s campaign $500.

But Cliffe’s connection to Buttigieg stands outside politics. It’s perhaps even more important than politics.

Years ago, when she and the future South Bend mayor both were students at Harvard, she says Buttigieg intervened when three men were about to assault her. He defended her and backed the men down.

In other words, he did the right thing — the decent thing. He didn’t look the other way. He saw wrong about to happen and did what a moral person should do. He moved to stop it.

Cliffe says she doesn’t agree with Buttigieg’s politics. She doesn’t plan to vote for him.

Nonetheless, she says, she wishes him well.

Cliffe’s message is straightforward. Just because she disagrees with Pete Buttigieg doesn’t mean that she doesn’t think he’s a good person.

Because, she makes clear, he is a good person.

Their disagreements about politics don’t change that.

The Cliffe-Buttigieg story reminded me of a couple of other incidents.

Some years ago, I was having lunch with a friend. The conversation turned to then-U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana.

Burton was a fierce partisan and an arch conservative. My friend is neither. He is as moderate and gentle a soul as one could find. One would expect him to view Burton with distaste.

But that wasn’t the case.

My friend said he voted for Burton in every election, even though he abhorred Burton’s strident rhetoric and extreme positions.

The reason, my friend said, was that Burton had been kind to him at a difficult point his life. The congressman intervened to solve a problem that, left unsolved, could have had devastating consequences for my friend.

“He helped me when he didn’t have to,” my friend said. “I always want to remember that.”

So, my friend voted for a man whose public pronouncements likely made him shudder with disgust, because Burton had done the right thing — the decent thing — and helped someone in need.

The other incident took place when I was executive director of what is now the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.

Indianapolis’s then-mayor, Democrat Bart Peterson, had called for banning some violent video games. The ACLU objected on First Amendment grounds.

One of the national cable news networks asked us to do a live segment discussing the issue. We broadcast from different studios.

After we each walked through our opening talking points, the host tried to ratchet up the tension between us. He asked the mayor, in effect, to tell me how wrong and short-sighted I was.

Peterson laughed.

He said, in essence:

No, I’m not going to go there. John and I just disagree on this. That’s all. That doesn’t mean that we have to be angry with each other about it.

It was a gracious gesture.

An act of decency.

These are angry days in America. We Americans seem to snarl at each other more often than we speak with each other.

Some of this is understandable.

Our differences of opinion are honest ones. There are issues that matter about which we disagree.

But stories like the one involving Nicole Cliffe and Pete Buttigieg remind us that we do not have to let our political differences — our anger — define us. We can choose another way.

We can remember that there are other things besides politics to consider.

One of those is basic human decency.

Maybe we should let it point the way more often than we now do.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.