At the David Whitmer Award presentation Tuesday evening, I found myself thinking about the man whose name the award carries and what his example asks of us today. Whitmer lived from 1805 to 1888. His world looked considerably different from ours. Yet, as the presenter spoke about his character, the distance between his time and ours seemed much smaller.

Honesty, integrity, kindness and service were central to the descriptions of his life. We still teach those values to our children and say we expect them from our leaders. The harder question is whether we practice them consistently enough that our neighbors would use those same words to describe us.

Although Whitmer’s legacy is rooted in Richmond, where he operated a successful livery stable and served as mayor, the example he set reaches well beyond one community. The qualities his neighbors admired are qualities we need in Excelsior Springs and anywhere people hope to build a good place to live. What interested me most was how people w…