What Happened To Integrity

 

This is the continuation of a story begun on our January 2018 Home Page. To go to an archived version of that page, click here: January 2018 Home Page Archive. To return to this month's actual Home Page, click on the Signal Corps orange Home Page menu item in the upper left corner of this page.

 

 

Which brings us to those other government agencies that we once thought housed men of integrity: the FBI, CIA and NSA.

Imagine, the head of the FBI, James Comey, leaking confidential information to the press, lying under oath to Congress, weaponizing confidential information, rigging investigations into corruption, misusing government information for political purposes, enabling money laundering, enabling racketeering by Hilary Clinton, and on, and on and on.

James Comey, what a piece of work that self centered reprobate turned out to be. A man only too ready to substitute his value system for society’s. A man who touts his integrity but seems to hold none. A man only too ready to obfuscate the truth, while placing into positions of authority within the FBI still others whose lack of values are only too clear to see, people like Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok.

Imagine an FBI with leaders willing to collude with others to frame those whose way of thinking and ideology conflicts with theirs, who readily and surreptitiously obstruct investigations and alter results in order to help their friends avoid prosecution, who use their power and rank to furtively alter the course of our government… all for the sake of political ideology? Still think it would have been a good idea to have joined the FBI when you left the Army? Probably not.

There are somewhere near 40,000 people in the FBI today. Clearly many of them are honest people who hold and practice genuine integrity. Likely too, many of the men in the FBI are former military Officers, who more likely than not would be prone to holding ethical standards of the kind we would approve of. Unfortunately, while this may all be true, it appears that regardless of how many people a powerful agency like the FBI has that are honest, all it takes are a few ideologs at the top to alter our country's destiny. These power brokers know only too well that if they hold enough authority, wield enough power, use the tricks of their trade to avoid oversight, and set their integrity aside in favor of a broken ideology, they can alter the course of America. James Comey, Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, the list goes on. It's no wonder Americans are more afraid of corruption within our government than of terrorism.

Need another example... in one of those agencies we former Army Officers thought were full of honorable people? How about the former Director of National Intelligence and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, James Robert Clapper Jr. A retired Lieutenant General in the Air Force, this man too is a reprehensible individual when it comes to ethics. Only too keen to lie under oath to Congress and the American people as to the extent of the surveillance being performed on us citizens, he doubled down on his “I know better than you what’s right for this country” attitude when, after leaving his job, he mounted and still pursues a one man political disinformation campaign aimed at undermining President Trump’s credibility. Not content to retire and go away, he's ubiquitously running around making appearances on the liberal talk show circuit, spouting opinions about how our government should run, and who the public should trust.

One has to wonder, where do these people get their gall and their guile?

Whether these are Hilary Clinton supporters or Trump haters, it matters not. What they all have in common is a lack of personal integrity… and the fact that far too many of them are ex-military Officers makes it worse. One might excuse Hilary Clinton for using her office and its influence to practice racketeering and money laundering… after all, she’s just a politician, and everyone knows that politicians are absent integrity. But the FBI? The CIA? The NSA? Is there one of these agencies that you would want to work for today?

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If one reads the press commentary on this topic… the topic of having and following a value system of one’s own, of displaying integrity, morals and ethics worthy of the words, one will see that the American public began to notice a slip in America’s moral compass taking place about 10 years ago. It started with the “me too” generation, and has been getting worse since then.

We won’t blame the me too generation for what we have today, but we will blame their parents, school teachers, scout leaders, parish priests… and all the rest, including the cop on the street… and for a few of you out there YOU, and even ME… we too should be blamed for what has happened to integrity. Our having collectively abdicated our responsibility not just to the youth we interface with each day, but the American society we once valued so much we were willing to fight for, is the cause of this trouble. Put simply: we have failed to pass on to the next generation a veneration for the lessons we learned, in our own youth, lessons about value systems.

Let's go back to our starting point, if you will:

We failed in Phase One… mostly by not giving our children a full and complete education regarding what values are all about. We did this during those precious first 18 years when the youth we brought to the world were under our wing.

We failed in Phase Two, by not showing them the direct and consequential ties that bind living a life of integrity with happiness and success.

And now we are failing in Phase Three, by letting them select for themselves a life based on ideology, rather than integrity. That is, by letting them measure their own worth based on ideology, rather than values.

While you are still alive Candidate, take the time now to latch on to one of those grand kids floating around in your extended family… the one you see out there wandering around with seemingly no purpose in life… you know which one he is… and help him begin to learn of integrity.

Make this your New Year’s resolution. Help a child in your life make sense of life by teaching him about integrity. Turn this challenge into your own personal Phase Four, and get it done before you depart this earth.

 

 

 

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This page originally posted 1 January 2018