Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Integrity




I have reconnected with a bunch of classmates over the past few weeks and even saw a picture of myself from my West Point Prep School days. Wow! I think all that has me thinking about the three words we lived by – and hopefully still do today – Duty, Honor, and Country.

Honor = integrity. I’ve learned over the years that although duty and country is key, I would say that integrity is the most important. If you fall short of a duty, you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off, fix it, and drive on. But integrity is something that once it is spoiled is nearly impossible to recover. We teach our children that above all protect your integrity and be honest in all that you do. We tell them – kind of tongue and cheek – that we will always find out what they do because we have ‘parent power’. :) So they might as well be honest in the first place. But there is a lot of truth in that because I believe the truth will always come out no matter how slick we think we are being. LOL


We also try our best to have them steer clear of the ‘gray areas’ of life. That’s when we tend to get into half-truths or the “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” categories. A half is as bad as a whole and it will hurt. Remember the ‘parent power’ from above.

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