There are people with guts in the world, the guts to do what's right.
Yet I can personally vouch for having witnessed quite a few narrowly-focused moral compromises made by people in the work world. Their motivations are scattered and varying, sometimes to get a promotion, to feel important, sometimes to hit an arbitrary goal, to get money, sometimes for lust. But the results the same: ensuring the end game becomes a moral maze of self-interest that ensures they end up on top, while the destruction of the larger goal gets shuffled in a the confusion of complicated objectives and hidden agendas. It just ends up a mess.
Yet in reality, in most of these ever-present corporate Dilbert schemes, the stakes are perceived at the moment to be high, but in reality often rank terribly low. I imagine these cowards giving themselves a high five to their bathroom mirror in their boxer shorts, as if they just won the Heisman instead of the Weaselman.
But in truth, I actually hate to think about what these same leaders would do in situations where the stakes really do matter, where they costs of errors are life or death. It is those truly gut wrenching moments where the delineation is drawn between real men and women of integrity versus moral cowards.
We really do have to dig deep into our gut, way deep down, to know which of those categories we would really fall in if times were truly excruciating tough -- situation where your children's life is at risk, where rape of the women in your life or you is at stake, where starvation is ever present, where death by extreme violence is the result of your voicing an opinion.
It is only through prayer that I could hope to muster the courage to do what is right in those situations. Even now, I don't always get it right.
But I read an article this weekend, about a leader from Zimbabwe. Not Robert Mugabe, who is a really very bad man -- massacred 25,000 member of the minority Ndebele tribe. And that's only one piece of the horrible Mugabe.
But Artur Mutambara. He says with courage, at the risk of his life, that Mugabe should go.
Reading the article made me ask myself again, would I really stand up if we were going to get tortured as he did? In my day to day life, I rarely see men and women standing up for their opinion even when the stakes are low. It's no fun to stand up against a lie or abuse when no one else is willing to- we do pay an ugly price some times. Would I really do it if I had to also survive torture or rape as a result? Would you?
One of Mutambara's quotes is extremely paramount, it reminds us Americans that we better be ready to risk it all. Risk is how others got us here in the first place -- a place of freedom-taken-for-granted where many of us waste our freedom by fighting like nonsensical little children in over-privileged office environments for stakes that in the end don't really matter.
It's time for us to grow up. Mutambara's quote gives us the chance:
Mutambara was asked by Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund about the reality that there is an alarmingly high probability that he might be killed for promoting freedom. Mutambara responded, "After all it was your Founding Fathers who said, 'give me liberty of death', he says, with a flashing broad smile. "I plan to gain the first, but I know I have to risk the second to get it."
We should take his lead. Our soldiers already are, and I'm glad to have their lead to follow.
I see that courage to fight and risk life and limb for freedom all the time. Just go to a VA hospital, or Walter Reed, Brooks, Bethesda NNMC, etc.
In my own life at such a smaller level, I see that fight for the moral high ground all the time. Doesn't seem like to many people are winning though.
Posted by: tony neria | December 14, 2007 at 06:01 PM