Large Fierce Mammal

On compromising principles and the justification of cheating:

“If there really is a principle involved, things are either black or white. There are no grey areas. You can’t be “a little bit” dead or “sort of” pregnant.  A ship is not seaworthy merely because the total area of its hull exceeds the total area of its holes. You can’t breathe for only 22 hours a day and not breathe for the other 2 hours. You have to breathe all the time because your physical survival depends on that consistent behavior. Likewise, you can’t have integrity only part of the time, because your spiritual survival depends on morally consistent behavior, too.

“Like the other important lessons of the sword, this is one you can take home from the salle.” ~ Adam Crown, M.d’A.

I might be inclined to regard political and legal matters existing or evolving in the United States of America as none of my business but for two issues:

1. I have some Esteemed Friends who are U. S. citizens, and so what affects them matters to me; and
2. To quote then Canadian Prime Minister Elliott Trudeau, speaking on 25 March 1969 to the Press Club in Washington, D. C. in reference to the relationship between Canada and the United States, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

To Live by the Sword: Integrity , an excerpt from which forms the lead in to this piece, is the title of an article by Adam Crown published 9 January 2013 to the highly recommended Swordmaster’s Grimoire. He has a lot of value to say on the subject of Integrity, and the pitfalls of a society that has forgotten what that means. Most particularly, he neatly packages the principles of Integrity as they must exist in all areas of Human endeavour, highlighting the folly of justifying their abandonment by means that mirror the way misuse of words by the uneducated gets their erroneous definitions entrenched in dictionaries – common usage; i. e., everybody’s doing it.

I recommend you click on the title of that article and absorb its message, whether or not you have, do, or ever will pick up a sword.