No, the title is not original, but as I sit here late on a Friday evening, I think there little more appropriate.
I am raising 4 children with my wife. I work a job. I give to my community and care to help to raise, not only my children, but those of my friends and neighbors with the time I have. I coach. Not just the sports, but lessons often learned in playing those sports. Those lessons which were handed down to me about life and how to live it, how to honour, and to honour in teaching that which was taught to me by my parents and their friends, those very tenants of a "right way of life" to my children and their friends. And, as such, I seek to honour my parents, grandparent and all those who came before me and who knew right from wrong and sought to instill it in me as they sought to instill in me the importance of the word honour.
Yet no matter how hard I try, today and really of late and most recent memory, I find the few of us who stand at the walls of the gate which guards decency, merit and right to be a dwindling honor guard, reduced by apathy and exhaustion and the prospect of an unjust defeat at the hands of the vicious horde of ego, greed and selfishness. I look across the ramparts (please, forgive the garrison's analogy but I am ever more convinced it is a war, if not a losing war, which we wage to try to find some light or glimpse of hope) and I see a growing despair in our shrinking ranks and closing enemies. I vainly seem to seek someplace or strategy from which we can snatch back our world, our lives, our communities from those who would seek to subvert all that made this world, and this country, what it was: a place where respect, hard work and courtesy enabled all to rise from slave and serf to king.
Whether it is the ooze which seeps from our media or the venom of our self-promoting politicians, somewhere we have all gotten it very wrong. Shame on us. We allow individuals with no more depth and complexity than an amoeba to roam and rule the halls of our government, subverting the people's voice with their own piped-in self-delusions of importance. We allow slackers and miscreants, who by nature assume that all should be given and not worked for, a spotlight, when instead we should use the light of truth and real sacrifice to shine upon them to send the scurrying like the parasites they are back into the shadows. We allow people into our towns and neighborhoods who seek to live according to their own selfish needs. Their mantra is the underlying belief that they are the only and most important planets in their solar systems, when it should be "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
It is late, and I am tired and my exhaustion is not merely that of lack of sleep but of broken promises, of living in a world where a man's word is no longer his bond, where "please" and "thank you", those very basic building blocks of civility, have disappeared from most corners, allowing the evil in words like "entitled" and "demanded" to envelop most of what we see every day.
I wonder what our children will say on that day, years from now, when what was good on this planet is a relic as dusty and unremembered as a tablet of an ancient civilization, cast in the corner of some museum as a curiosity with no real meaning.
I am not a religious man. I am a faithful man. I know that I live - I should say I try to live, as I fail, as we all do, no matter how hard I try as is the nature of being human, but also find some measure of success in realizing my failures and seeking to rectify them and not repeat them - by a code. It is a simple code and one that we have heard since someone was hear on earth to speak it.
I honour my parents and my ancestors, my family and friends. I seek to be the model I want my children to see and become, as I saw in my parents and have tried to become in their example. I understand the value of friendship and seek to always apply the maximum amount of time and energy I can to ensure that those bonds of more than just acquaintance count for what they are: two-way bridges and bonds of shared experience and joy. I seek to always tell the truth, to spare the feelings of others and to understand that a hard day's work is reward in itself in the feeling achieved of accomplishment, satisfaction and pride (as I often tell my son, and find myself thinking of the advice I am giving in tasks I do: "If you are going to do a job, do it well").
With all of this in mind, and seeking to gain some sway of momentum back in the battle we wage every day against the dark which seems determined to envelop this world of our, this is my manifesto, my rallying "Magna Carta", my "Declaration of Independence". It may start small, but in these little actions, the swell may rise as if a tidal wave in grace, honor, and civility that may turn the tide back our way.
Say "please" and "thank you" with everything you do and receive.
Hold a door for a lady
Rise when a woman enters a room
Shake hands firmly and make eye contact
Lend a hand even when you don't have one to give
Think of others before yourself
Take time to write a note of thanks, in penmanship, and, in such, show real thanks in your efforts
Respect your elders
Read more
Watch more, speak less
Have faith in your God, your friends and your neighbors and demand of them exactly what you demand of yourself
And remember, if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.
