National Integrity Day?
When I read the tagline for this story, I began pondering. Have we deteriorated so much that we need a National Integrity Day to remind us how to have integrity? We even have a Malaysian Institute of Integrity set up just for this. I wonder what we have been teaching our children during moral and religious classes in schools. Webster defines integrity as "adherence to to a code of moral, artistic, or other values". Oxford defines it as "the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles". Have we deteriorated to such an extent that honesty and moral principles have taken a back seat that we need to have a national integrity day to instil back honesty and moral principles back into the populace. Does this mean that the moral and religious classes in schools have failed?
Perhaps our country have been very successful in leadership by example. I remember the phrase "kepimpinan melalui teladan" or "leadership by example". So if we say something and do something else, people will follow what we do, not what we say. Someone once said, "what you do speak so loud that I cannot hear a word you say".
This 1895 poem is a very meaningful piece of work by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Perhaps there was more honour among men at the turn of the 20th century.
Perhaps our country have been very successful in leadership by example. I remember the phrase "kepimpinan melalui teladan" or "leadership by example". So if we say something and do something else, people will follow what we do, not what we say. Someone once said, "what you do speak so loud that I cannot hear a word you say".
This 1895 poem is a very meaningful piece of work by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Perhaps there was more honour among men at the turn of the 20th century.
posted by Guy in the glass at 1:31 AM
6 Comments:
u have many questions. u offer answers from a poet. would like to know ur personal answers as u look into the glass. there's honour and integrity in some men then and now, and there's lack of honour and integrity in some other men then and now. i'm interested to learn from ur perspective of how you keep to be that "Man" Kipling refers to.
another warm-warm-chicken-shit initiative from our tardy aab administartion...?
may be targetting the p_l_c_ and p_l_t_c_ _n leh ?
unker Reflections,
Integrity or otherwise, I live the life I owe responsible to, myself and my family. Harm no 1, law abiding citizen. Mebe I juz donch quite dig da word "integrity"..
Good day.
As long as there are humans on this planet, there can never be integrity, *grin* Being human means having an opinion, and much as we can never have the same thumbprint or DNA as the person sitting next to us, so it is so that we will never be able to achieve absolute integrity. We can put up a big facade in front of people and pretend that we are exemplary citizens, but behind closed doors, the backstabbing continues. It's just another fact of life that we have to contend with, as long as we continue trying and don't concede defeat, the journey towards absolute integrity continues....
All that aside, I think even through all the rubbish that we deal with here in good ol Malaysia, I consider myself fortunate to live 'peacefully' with everyone else here, and not in places where on a daily basis you face the chance of being blown to bits by someone of the same faith/colour/whatever you wanna call it.
The thing with integrity is that it is not something easy to teach. It is probably how you view life and live it. Taking the definition from Oxford, I feel that the poem "IF" tries to tell you how to relate to others and "the guy in the glass" tells you how to live with yourself. The world is not homogenous nor ideal, so we need to learn to deal with disappointment and adversaries, and not succumb to the perhaps natural reaction.
guy in the glass, i think i got it, thanks. hope you'll elaborate on your last sentence in your future post - i'd value your personal examples.
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