"The price of greatness is responsibility." -- Winston Churchill
Yesterday I wrote about accountability. The fact is, I have not always been accountable. I have shirked responsibilities and duties, saying to myself, "Someone else will do it." Sometimes someone else did do it (whatever it was), and sometimes they didn't.
Occasionally I congratulated myself when I failed to perform my duties. I said, in effect, "Wow! Glad I got out of that." But those
self-congratulatioins were short lived as I admitted that I may have gotten out of work, but I paid a price in loss of self-esteem.
I wonder if that is what is going on in our nation today: as people "get out of" work and live upon the work of others, does their self-esteem plummet as mine did? The more we appreciate our own worth, the more we feel able to make things happen and the more we want to act responsibly toward others. And the more responsibly we act toward others, the better our society will be.
So, for today, I am grateful for those who do not get out of work.
There is an economy of work. What we do not work to pay for, we will pay for in a secondary currency. For example, if we do not work to earn money to buy bread, we will pay for bread given to us in a loss of self-esteem. If we do not work to maintain health, we may pay for that later by artificially maintaining health with pills or other medical procedures. Sometimes, the currency does not convert well, and we end up with less. Less bread, less health, less self-esteem, etc. Sometimes we end up with shortfalls through no fault of our own. In these cases, we are better able to recover from the "debt" if we had primary currency prior to the event. While it usually seems harder to work now for the necessary primary currencies, in the end, it is always a better return on investment. To use a technical math term, entitlement programs suck.
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