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Thursday, October 25, 2007

There Were These Things Called "Honor" And "Integrity"

This is Steven Petrick Writing.

What are these things?

They are not showy things, but rather the things that define an individual.

They show up in the small things one does.

One game of Star Fleet Battles I played had me commanding a Klingon dreadnought while my opponent commanded a Gorn Dreadnought. It was an absolutely glorious battle. My opponent's ship was utterly destroyed and he failed to score a single internal on my ship. At the time I kept my Energy Allocation Forms in plastic protectors and recorded my data with an alcohol pen. With the battle over, I looked down on my EAF with the eraser poised to clean it off and noticed that I had never, ever, allocated for shields. This meant that not only had I been scoring damage on shields that I had not paid for, but that every turn I had had four extra points of power to spend. It would have been a simple matter to erase the form and forever conceal what had happened from my opponent. Instead, I placed the form back on the table, reached across and grabbed my opponent's hand and congratulated him on his victory.

At one point I drew money out of an ATM. When I counted the funds withdrawn (a habit from being a pay disbursement officer in Korea), I found the machine had given me $5.00 more than I had requested. There was no way the bank would have ever known where that $5.00 had disappeared to. But I drove to the bank, turned the $5.00 in, and reported that the ATM might have a problem that needed fixing.

Not to long ago I had dinner at a barbecue place that SVC and I frequent. While talking to the operator and paying for my meal I handed him a $10.00 bill, and handed me back a $10.00 bill and some loose change. I could have just walked off, but I pointed out that I had paid with a $10.00 bill and handed the money back.

Those are me.

But I can also point to Robert Patterson. Someone I rarely met (a convention here and there) and mostly only knew from the internet. I got dragged into a game of Star Fleet Battles "for money" once. I was there because the other players had, on finding out that I was allergic to some foods, gone to a different restaurant than the one they had all wanted to go to just so I would not be eating alone. Something I tried to convince them would be okay as I was quite used to it. They, having insisted that I could not eat alone while I was with them, I felt obligated and when they needed a sixth person for the "money game", I entered out of that sense of obligation, though I personally detest gambling. The game had reached the point where the winner was going to be sorted out in short order, when Robert noted an error on his Energy Allocation form. The $100.00 entry fee was not money that Robert would not notice missing, but having found the error he still stood up and eliminated himself from the game.

Honor and integrity are not grand gestures in public forums made by individuals who are trying to gain your vote. They are the things we do when there is no one watching that define us as individuals, and what makes a civilization work. As these things are removed from the body politic, the society, and the civilization, decline.