Today's
Meditation:
I
would truly like to think that most people want to be honest
most of the time, but the evidence that I see day after day
tells me that that may not be true. What that means to
me is not that I should despair, but that I should do my
best to make sure that in my own piece of the world, I
should be as honest as I possibly can in order to at least
let the people around me know that they can trust me, and to
hopefully influence some young people to be as honest as
they can be.
I
don't believe that honesty means complete truth 100% of the
time. I've said that food is good when I haven't
really liked it, and I'm fine with that, partly because I
know that the fact that I don't like it doesn't mean it's
not good. And if someone is demanding information from
me who is just going to use that information to hurt someone
else, I'm more than willing to say "I don't know,"
even if I do know.
Honesty,
I believe, is being true to ourselves and the other people
in our worlds. It's keeping our word when we make
promises, and it's being consistent enough that other people
can trust us when we tell them something. It's
following just laws and taking responsibility for mistakes,
and then doing our best to fix them. Is it relative?
Probably, but I don't know enough to say for sure.
Of
course, one of Shaw's most important points is that we must
be honest and model honesty before we can ever tell children
that they should be honest. And in our world of today,
especially concerning politics, this can be an extremely
difficult proposition to fulfill. But we must try if
our children are to have any chance of building a better,
more honest, more ethical world.
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