Flashback 1997: Shrewd Edgar shows quitting is underrated

     I liked Jim Edgar and even voted for him. A Republican before that meant pledging fealty to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor. When I heard he had died Sunday, I looked back at what I'd written about him and found this.

"Some people in politics stay too long." 
             — Jim Edgar

     A class act, that Edgar. Sure, he was on the wrong side of patronage, and slightly stained by the MSI mess. But all told, a first-rate politician; at least he didn't end up in prison, and not every Illinois governor can say that.
     Myself, I was pulling for him to run for the Senate against Carol Moseley-Braun, whose performance wavers between the twin poles of disappointment and disappearance. Edgar would have easily blown Moseley-Braun out of the water — reduced her to a few floating scraps of debris and an oil slick.

Jim Edgar

     That's the downside of Edgar's noble act. He gets to walk off stage, tall, dignified, at the top of his game, and we're left scrabbling around in the mud with the usual crew of politicians, who wouldn't abandon their stations at the public trough if the Lord God Almighty sent them a private invitation to do so.
     It's still too early to tell whether Edgar is really retiring, or just making a brief tactical retreat. I don't want to praise him for abandoning public life so he can sit on the front porch of his Downstate log mansion, teaching the grandkids to whittle train whistles, only to have him show up a few months after leaving office as a lobbyist for North Korea.
     Instead, I'd like to applaud the one undeniable aspect of Edgar's announcement. Whatever he ends up doing, he certainly won't be governor anymore. He exercised one of the most underrated and unfairly maligned options in life: he quit.
     Quitting gets a bad rap. All those slogans pinned up in high school football locker rooms, all those little fatherly speeches, have created the general impression that quitting is bad.
     In reality, quitting is an art.
     True, like art, many people do it badly. Ross Perot was a bad quitter. Stirred the pot and then bolted just when it got hot. Shannon Faulkner, too, and for the same reason; having gone through all of that legal mess to join the Citadel, she should have died standing up rather than quit after a couple of days.
     But that's my judgment. Faulkner might look back at quitting the Citadel as the smartest thing she ever did. Quitting should be a private matter — something you do for yourself and not for anybody else (except in the case of Moseley-Braun. Her quitting would be an act of public beneficence).
     Edgar isn't quitting office for the good of the state. Whatever his motive, he's doing it for himself. Which is as it should be. You've only got one life — nobody comes to you on your deathbed and says, "Hey, you stayed in that position you hated for a long, long time. Here's a few extra years as a bonus. Now go do what you really want."
     When should you quit? When you can't stand where you are anymore. That sounds simple, but most people can't figure it out, and they stay in places — jobs, marriages, cities  —they hate, for too long, because they're afraid of setting themselves free from the stone, even as it drags them down.
     How many offices are overrun by the zombies from "Night of the Living Dead," stumbling around, their arms stiffly in front of them, their faces flat masks of belligerent defeat?
     Why haven't those people quit if they dislike where they are so much? Well, first, quitting takes courage. Jobs are hard to come by, and so people cling to them, even when they shouldn't. Even though I have yet to hear of anybody who quit a job and then starved to death. ("EMACIATED CORPSE FOUND HUDDLED AT DOOR OF FORMER EMPLOYER: `HE QUIT,' SAYS EX-BOSS")
     Wasn't that the lesson of Vietnam? Know when to cut your losses and run?
     As so often with pundits, I'm bad at taking my own advice. I should resign here and now, but that seems a big step just to give a column a snappy finish.
     The times I have quit, however, were usually wonderful. In college, I recall, I foolishly assumed that breezing through introductory economics meant I should take a more advanced course.
     Big mistake. After sitting through every class, paying close attention, I realized — the night before the midterm  —that I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
     So instead of taking the midterm and flunking, I went to the registrar's and dropped the course.
     Quitting violated every instinct of nose-down, reflexive struggle that I had ever been taught. And it felt great.

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 24, 1997