Some Lines from a book titled -How could you do that?! The abdication of character, courage, and conscience By -Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Good people, people who act out of conscience and courage, seem to have a tough time understanding the blatantly bad actions of other because they can’t really comprehend the desire to do wrong, the thrill of doing wrong, and the lack of conscience to control that impulse. Therefore, they struggle to find excuses to explain away the bad behaviors as actions over which the perpetrators had no control. A history of abuse has become the vogue excuse for begging exoneration for acts ranging from naughty, to wrong, to downright evil.
Quality moments require quantity time in which to occur spontaneously. When you are about to die at 102 are you going to look back with regret about work or family.
Not doing right may have momentary payoffs but will wreak havoc with your self-esteem, respect from others, and quality of life. Think more seriously before you act without character, courage, or conscience. The rest of your life depends on what you do with any one moment.
Feelings can be very strong, yet decisions can be made not to stay in a relationship in which people see themselves as manipulated or made to feel totally responsible for the others well-being and state of mind. That may be perceived as just too much of a burden. Assume this is permanent and challenge yourself to grow from it: to deal with the other person in the moment as equals. Others hurt too. We forget that scars and mended bones are stronger than the originals.
Values involve not only how you behave, but also the behavior you accept in others you are intimate with. Perfect may not be possible but striving toward it as an ideal is. It is an act of striving that we demonstrate character, courage, and conscience.
Millions in America are living up to the ideal, but the ideal is not possible? When the ideal is valued, people make the sacrifices and efforts necessary to try to reach it. Bad stuff happens, and when it does, you simply do your best with the situation. However, that is different from devaluing the ideal, never working toward it, and expecting no judgement and no negative consequences. Some people wish to be blind about their actions, as though their search for happiness and comfort precluded the right of judgment against them. People abandon their family and think there is nothing wrong with it but assert that judgements against them are wrong.
When character, not opinion, is the issue, the moral obligation to stand behind ‘right’ becomes not only the measure of you as a person, but portends the way of the world. Such judgement and response helps guide the world towards the ideal ever so asymptomatically. Doing no evil but shunning someone is a powerful tool in motivating others behavior.
When you stand by and watch ‘wrong’ and do nothing about it, when you get involved with ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘wrongdoers’, you are wronging yourself, family, community, and the moral values that have protected you in the past. Not taking moral positions and knowingly protecting, supporting, or benefiting from wrong would be the soul and psyche like flesh eating bacteria are to the body.
There are millions of individual roads to immediate gratification, and there mostly a ‘slide on ice’ with silvers as the reward at the bottom. The roads to nobility of the human species are few and difficult, but true happiness and joy meet you at the top. People report suffering a great loss when something of sentimental value is lost or stolen. That means possessions are not just defined by their purpose or price; objects become special because of the special meaning with which we arbitrarily imbue them.
Well, eating is just refueling bones, muscle, and organs, unless you surround it with ritual and prayer. Sex is just an acting out of a biological imperative, unless you reserve it for committed love and responsible reproduction. Life is just about personal survival until death, unless you act in ways which are altruistic, compassionate, and creative. Values give meaning to life and all its otherwise mundane aspects. When you behave in ways that give your life meaning, you are fully human. As you aspire to be more fully human, you deal with the facts of life with courage, you make choices with conscience, and by those acts you will be known as a person with character.
Integrity is its own reward if what you are seeking is spiritual peace, a quality life, and quality relationships. It is wrong to be destructive and disruptive to another’s marriage. Every great relationship is such because it suffered through the disillusionment phase, and other such lows. In fact, it is the process of surviving the lows that bonds us closer together, and leavens what we call love. It takes time to get from the fantasy to the reality, and honor and commitment are the forces that get you there.
Honor is not contingent upon ease or difficult.
Your first response when you make kids is to parent them. That means everything else comes second. If you are blind to your responsibilities, you ultimately will not like yourself. You all have to make the best of a bad situation so that you do not abandon a child. You do not quit on kids. There must be no divorce between parent and child. Committed marriages and responsible parenting need to become the new norms; instead, we are beginning to tolerate what was once considered immoral or shameful as either acceptable alternative or an unavoidable reality. That would not be so if society reinforced the notion of obligation. The people you choose to befriend and the behaviors you choose to tolerate are a measure and reflection of you and your character. When the individuals give themselves the permission to do anything they want anytime they want they will ultimately be alone for it is in the obligations to others the integrity of our beliefs and actions; our regards for agreements and pledges; our sincerity; the bond of our word; our honesty; our conformity to right and good; our fairness; and our inability to be readily influenced away from these character traits by the seduction of exciting momentary gain that others come to be comfortable and secure with us, therefore love us. Then we are never alone.
Choosing personal and professional integrity often brings with it a great external price: demotion, firing, even harassment. But choosing personal and professionally integrity never brings with it a great internal price: shame, guilt, regret, and self-loathing. The external price can be responded to legally or with a change in venue. The internal price is indelibly etched into your soul and character.
When once conscience is ignored or bypassed with details purported to make their circumstance different, there is hell to pay both internally and externally. When an individual does not feel guilt, our society has a sociopath on its hands. Only good people feel guilt, only good people learn from guilt. Forgiving and staying do not have to go hand in hand. Forgiving has more to do with a letting go of the intensity of emotion that is a reaction to the dastardly deeds. Forgiving is about putting events in perspective and getting on. Forgiving does not demand acceptance.
Sometimes an honest assessment of the past shows us that small weeds have been in the garden a long time- weeds we frantically pluck out so the garden will appear clean.
Acknowledgement, true remorse, change, and redress are what we have available; a commitment to a life of character, courage, and conscience and the motivation to teach others. Perhaps the lingering guilt is there lest we forget.
Above sentences are selected from the book -Bharti Raizada