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Show A5 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, September 16, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor Wrestling with Integrity Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. James L. Davis During election years, especially during presidential election years, you invariably hear people lament the loss of integrity by our elected officials. While it certainly seems that many of our politicians are lacking in personal honor, it’s also true that politicians aren’t alone when it comes to a loss of integrity. It’s just that politicians are more closely scrutinized than most of us. Not only are we as a people a little lacking when it comes to personal integrity, many of us aren’t even sure what the word means. In fact, in 2005 the word integrity was the most looked up word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. According to Merriam-Webster integrity is defined as: firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values; an unimpaired condition; or the quality or state of being complete or undivided. I have always looked to people I admire in my life as men or women of integrity that I would like to emulate, but it wasn’t until recently that I really paused to consider what it is to be a person of integrity. I had always assumed that integrity was interchangeable with honesty and while that may be true, I’m not sure it’s entirely true. I had the opportunity to attend a lecture on integrity by author, professor and motivational speaker Quinn McKay, and the first thing I learned in the lecture was that when it came to integrity, I hadn’t wrestled with the word enough to be entirely sure what it meant. The author of several books on integrity, most recently The Bottom Line on Integrity explained that integrity was something that you had to wrestle with. That it wasn’t meant to be an easy thing to be a person of integrity. “Integrity is often thought to be a natural behavior and dishonesty an abnormal one. Actually, integrity is an attribute that must be learned and then meticulously cultivated until it has grown to its full capacity. After that a constant vigilance is required to sustain it. The bumps, rips, tears, snares of everyday life will cause it to weather, decay, and disintegrate if constant maintenance, upkeep, and protection is not in place,” McKay said in the book. As a society we like to crucify not only our public officials but anyone and everyone that is in the public eye for what we perceive as misdeeds. While we may not always know how to adequately define unethical behavior, as Associate Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, we know it when we see it. Since listening to that lecture I have wondered how our current political climate fits into a discussion on integrity. Is the presidential campaign of either candidate being conducted with integrity? Is a disavowal by a candidate to the latest smear tactic of their own campaign enough to restore their integrity? Abraham Lincoln said “I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day,” and I suppose that as a nation if we could all commit to that then we would find ourselves in a far better place than we are right now. While we like to say as a nation that we expect and even demand that our leaders be men and women of integrity, of honor, until we take the time to wrestle with our own integrity, until we define it for ourselves and use it as our guiding principal, then we will get exactly what we deserve from our leaders. George Washington said “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” If, as McKay suggests, integrity is a challenge that must be wrestled with, then perhaps it is time for all of us to make our way to the mat. PUBLIC FORUM Swimming Pool Management I am writing this as a follow-up to the letter printed in the The Emery County Review a few weeks ago by Chris Collard concerning the new swimming pool and its management. I agree with the article and would like to thank the Review for getting this issue out to the public. At the time of application Marilyn Collard was already a certified pool operator, which is a much more difficult and inclusive certification than was required for the job. She already had it. This certification is harder to earn and entails a lot more components involved with running and maintaining a swimming pool. Moreover, she’s also certified to teach the lifeguard class and has done so for multiple years. It is difficult to understand how anyone with these qualifications would not warrant an interview. She was very instrumental in getting a new pool in the first place. She sent around petitions and really pushed voters to vote for it. I worked with Marilyn for five years at the city pool, with two years of that under her management, and I saw her do many good things with the swimming programs. She alone came up with the junior lifeguard and swim team programs for the city pool, both of which were big hits and drew many participants from all over the county. She’s done merit badge classes and has literally taught half of this county how to swim. Marilyn knows swimming and swimming pools inside and out, has great passion for it, and loves doing it. I personally have watched her not only teach hundreds of kids to swim, but also as she instructed our swim teachers how to develop the fundamentals of swimming in young swimmers. She knows the details of every stroke and every component of swimming, and has been gifted with the ability to teach. She has trained herself with Olympic coaches and had experience no one else in our county has. As someone who plans on using the new swimming pool, I want somebody running it who knows what they are doing and will be able to make further improvements. Our entire county has lost out because she was overlooked for the manager position, but it will be a much larger loss, and especially the youth will suffer, if she is again overlooked for the position involving our swimming programs. Her great expertise will benefit not only the casual swimmer but those who want to swim competitively as well, and it is my hope that this expertise and her passion will be used to make our new facility the best. She would be a huge advocate for community. If we want our swimming programs to be the best Marilyn needs to be involved. I’m excited for the new pool and want somebody with her level of knowledge involved. - Amber Reed Orangeville Say It Ain’t So, Joe Susan Estrich Sometimes Joe Biden, bless his good intentions, doesn’t know when to stop. I won’t recount past instances of this -- I’ll leave that to the RNC -- but the most recent is a painful example of what happens when a short answer will do and you give a long-winded one instead. At a rally in New Hampshire, a questioner actually expressed his pleasure that Barack Obama had chosen Biden as his running mate over Hillary Clinton, a sentiment not universally shared among Democrats. Biden, to his credit, wanted to be sure that no one would later say that he had in any way questioned the New York senator’s qualifications (as he once did his own running mate’s). “Make no mistake about this,” Biden responded. “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight. She’s a truly close personal friend, she is qualified to be president of the United States of America; she’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America…” That was the place to stop. That was the moment in which you succeed in not making news, which is the usual goal of a vice presidential candidate, unless the news relates to the poor judgment of your opponent, not your running mate. Biden, however, known for his occasional loquaciousness, did not stop. He then made news, questioning the judgment of the would-be president who had placed him on the ticket instead of Hillary. “And quite frankly,” Biden concluded, “it might have been a better pick than me.” It’s not that I disagree. She might have been. But at this point, that’s an argument that helps Republicans, not Democrats, and helps McCain, who did not pass over a woman whose qualifications are open to question, as opposed to Obama, who passed over a woman whose qualifications are not. There is something happening with women voters in America, maybe not among the most elite women who blog on liberal websites, but among women of almost every political stripe who may decide the election this fall. They identify with Sarah Palin and are recoiling at the cheap shots that Democrats, who have no reason to be so desperate but are acting as if they do, are lobbing in her direction. Her only qualification being that she hasn’t had an abortion? Ouch. Double ouch. Not just a poor choice of words, but a sexist sentiment. Say goodbye and good night to half the mothers in America on that one. It is no time to remind voters that Obama could have, much less should have, chosen Hillary. It is no time to give them another reason to feel connected to a Republican ticket with whom they disagree on many of the issues that most directly affect their families. Ultimately, McCain will win or lose, not Sarah Palin. Ditto for Obama. But vice presidents -- and especially the choice of them -- reflect significantly on the judgment of the would-be president. I remember talking to Bill Clinton a week or so before the Democratic Convention in 2000 -- and given how right Clinton turned out to be, I feel perfectly comfortable telling this story now. We discussed whom Al Gore might choose to be his running mate and why Clinton had chosen Gore eight years earlier. The one person I hope he doesn’t pick, the then-president told me, is Joe Lieberman. The reason was that the choice of Lieberman, one of the first senators to speak out against Clinton, would be seen as a direct effort to distance Gore from Clinton. Of course, President Clinton said all the right things when Lieberman was picked, but he and I and everyone else in the world understood what the choice signified. In my judgment, it was that choice, and Gore’s underlying successful effort to distance himself from the economic accomplishments of the preceding eight years (for which he should have been taking credit), that turned what should have been an easy victory into a 5-4 loss. By choosing Palin, McCain effectively distanced himself from George W. Bush, the man many Democrats hoped to run against this fall. The new “couple” is McCain and Palin, not McCain and Bush. Smart. By choosing Biden, Obama effectively distanced himself from Hillary Clinton, no matter how many campaign appearances she may be making for him now. That may or may not have been a smart choice. But it is hardly one Democrats should invite voters to revisit in this post-Palin era. The casual and sometimes unconscious sexism of so many liberals in the two weeks since Palin was picked has raised hackles, which reminders of how Hillary was passed over by Obama can only exacerbate. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) |
