There was a time when bucking the trends was looked upon as pitiful and in desperate need of rejection and even punishment. With our culture going downhill faster than a wagon load of fat kids, I, for one, believe it is past time to reverse that tend! I believe that we need more people who are willing, on a personal level, to deliberately buck some of the present trends. We need more courageous thinking adults with a set of principles that they are willing to live by and even being ready to take some heat to defend. We need principled people who are willing to change themselves to fit the truth rather than more people twisting the truth and manipulating reality to fit the latest cultural trends.
In short, we need principled people willing to be counter-cultural! We need more individuals who don't wait till enough people agree with them or even join them! We need more individuals willing to go it alone, if necessary! We need more individuals willing to set an example for even the few to follow, rather than following the example of the herd! We need more individuals who are willing to be the change they wish to see! We need people who are willing to die, if necessary, for truth, honesty, respect, communal values and eternal principles - even if they have to go it alone!
As I write this, I cannot help but recall the powerful words of President Theodore Roosevelt. His words describe the type of people we need more of today to save our culture, not the mean and nasty "cultural warriors" who make the news every evening these days, people who are not solid and principled themselves, but want a dictator to be strong for them and make others fall in line to be more like themselves! We need real heroes, not angry, loud, personally weak losers and anarchists with no real morals or sound principles. People filled with anger, resentment and hatred are leading us over a cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings!
Here is the challenge, outlined by President Theodore Roosevelt, that we really need. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Stephen Covey spoke eloquently of the power of a quality individual to effect change for the better when he wrote, "The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people."
Alexis de Tocqueville may have said it even better, about the need for strong individuals, than I can when he said, “It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.”
It seems to me that our country, our parishes, our communities and our families will get stronger one principled person at a time or, without a significant number of such principled persons, those groups will self-destruct as communities! There are no short-cuts or quick fixes! No one can save us from us, but us!
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