Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Tuesday ADD Irregulars, Refugees, Phamily, Early Birds, Dawn Patrol, Conversants, Lurkers and all the rest of you wonderful wanderers at Rubin Report, Phetasy and Padre's. How about venturing back to some quotes and commentary from your early morning Friar? Today's topic - honor. Something we could probably use more of in this shattered age of cultural skepticism and personal destruction. Off to the quotes!

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. - Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals

t is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. - Mark Twain, Notebook

Throughout most of my life, clocking in currently at only 55, honor has been something that been called into the question, often mocked and routinely discredited and destroyed for as long as I can remember. I think the fall of honor happened sometime during the Vietnam War and the way our culture dishonored those men when they returned from their service. Many left thinking they were honoring and serving the nation and returned to the culture called them butchers, monsters and murderers.

Perhaps the issue prior to this massive fall of honor in our culture was the blanket honoring of professions and not being critical enough of individuals who did not merit the honor their profession might have possessed. I am not certain. Certain professions of service, sacrifice and dedication have the potential to be honored and ought to be honored if we want to encourage more people to chose a difficult path rather than a selfish path. It is far to easy to indulge our selfish side, the feed the ego rather than rise above it.

Once we felt free to categorically shame our men of sacrifice, the floodgates opened. No vocation was free from potential mockery, shaming or discounting. Dishonoring our service men was a fast act of dishonor and so many of our Vets bear those scars far worse than the scars of combat. The help and understanding they needed was often met with contempt. It wasn't until the the first Gulf War that I think we learned the lessons of collectively shaming such individuals. Sadly we have returned to that now in our treatment of law enforcement. No profession gets an uncritical pass nor should it be instantly & collectively denigrated. Ask, question and understand the whatness of the vocation before filtering if through your preprogrammed biases and blind spots.

Honor - so many vocations and professions that once depended upon the possibility to possess honor as its form of compensation have lost their luster in the current age. I am not sure of the remedy, but I do know this, I can honor individuals, tell them, thank them, acknowledge them. A little considerate humanity goes a long way. I also know I don't have to praise the clowns, honor the users, or idolize the idiots just because our culture cannot distinguish between them and vocations of service & sacrifice, the builders of culture and prosperity. Happy discerning mindful friends! Meanwhile somewhere else is this beautiful spot of reality - there are so many - Happy Tuesday!

Summer Fields At The Red Barn Photograph by Debra and Dave Vanderlaan