Where Have All the Grown Men Gone?

Up until about 30 years ago, so I've been told, one could sell a car in Alabama and write a bill of sale on anything, most notably, according to my source, even a paper bag. Of course, this illustrates a bygone era in our country: the handshake sealing a deal; a man's word being his bond; and so on. This is the way it was when my parents grew up. Yes, there were dishonest men but they were notorious, ostracized and often "tarred and feathered".

Today, there are contracts, torts and surety bonds. Legal agreements are supposed to take the place of all of the above and protect those who are supposedly of good character and need protection from anyone who isn't. Anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of business knows that this system simply doesn't work. We live in an age of the "Loophole". Known as small print and sometimes even hidden in the large print, is the ability to renege on one's obligations under the contract. Which brings us to the purpose of all of this meandering: Honesty. Or, living with honor.

Corporations spend millions of dollars a year hiring speakers and consultants to teach everyone on their staff what really amounts to living the Golden Rule. Then, the same companies spend millions more on attorney fees to create agreements with other businesses that imply that the company lives by this rule and that they suspect no one else does. Then we have Congress, who legislates morality. They will take your money and if in their view, we citizens are not doing enough to straighten out inequality and inequities in our society, they'll do it for us. The net result typically being at the very least, failed programs and our money being squandered.

This is all symptomatic of the lack of honor in our culture. It's seen everyday in men who promise and will only deliver if it suits them at the time. We see it in men who make vows at the altar and then deftly justify breaking their commitments to their wives. In business, men enter into agreements with no intention of honoring them. (I'm being gender specific one, for the sake of expediency and two, because being one, I can speak more authoritatively about the way we think.) For the brightest, it's always knowing the loopholes that provide the justification for not honoring the commitment.

Distilled to its' simplest elements, if one does not have a moral center and thus, live a principled life, one cannot begin to understand what making a commitment means. And with so little evidence of this in our society, it is unlikely to be learned by experience. It has to be inculcated as a part of a child's education in the home. If the lessons being taught in the home are not being lived by the parent, it will never be "owned" by the child. Consequently, the fact that so few among us live with honor points to the fact that we either have never been taught right from wrong, or we have abandoned this precept because we deemed it too difficult to do so.

It is difficult to do the right thing in all cases. We don't do the right thing because it's easy, however, we do it to live with Honor.