<<..I think trying your best and failing is a great learning tool. Ive learned much more about me, and my limits by loosing and coming back to fight again. People who fail to learn how to fail are doomed to that fate. Its sad, and a comentary on our society that we are afraid to allow are children to understand that when they get knocked down(lose) its not a crime but the crime is not getting back up and trying again. Frankly our society is just unraveling before my eyes. The crying multimillion dollar, gun toting athletes to CEO's so greedy they are willing to jeopordise 1000's of people to feed their own ego's. We are trully a ship adrift with no captain...>>
MM: Interesting comments...unfortunately, I tend to agree with most of them...Our leaders in Washington clearly have NOT set the best example -- we currently have Bush, Cheney and The Secretary of The Army being investigated. Do we have leaders with integrity that really 'walk the talk'..?? I'm sure they're out there BUT most probably are not in Washington...Too bad John McCain isn't President -- IMO, he seems like one of the few straight shooters in The Capital.
Here's a good editorial written by the creator of Dilbert...
nytimes.com
Cubicle Crimes
By SCOTT ADAMS
Editorial / Op-Ed
The New York Times
July 11, 2002
DANVILLE, Calif. — Apparently, without anyone's noticing, our entire universe collapsed into a black hole and emerged in another dimension where everything is backward: Bill Gates (who used to be evil) is spending billions to vaccinate children in third-world countries, while the Catholic Church (which used to be good) is defending priests accused of molesting children. The stock market (which used to go up) now only drifts downward. And the surest way to lose respect is to mention you started a dot-com.
But here's the strangest backwardism of all: People seem surprised that captains of industry are stealing vast amounts of money at every opportunity. Back in our old dimension everyone assumed that C.E.O.'s and C.F.O.'s were weasels. Now it's big news.
I think it's useful to put these corporate scandals in perspective. Every employee I ever worked with in my old cubicle-dwelling days was pillaging the company on a regular basis, too. But the quantity of loot was rarely newsworthy. My weasel co-workers were pocketing office supplies, fudging expense reports, using sick days as vacation and engaging in a wide array of work-avoidance techniques.
Most people rationalize this kind of behavior by saying that corporations are evil and so the weasel employees deserve a little extra. The C.E.O.'s and C.F.O.'s aren't less ethical than employees and stockholders; they're just more effective. They're getting a higher quality of loot than the rank and file, and for that they must be punished.
I have some friends in law enforcement who say the only crooks that get caught are the stupid ones. Assuming this holds true for C.E.O.'s, it's bad news for the economy. I have to think that at least a few of the executives who are running billion-dollar companies are smart, so we might be seeing the tip of the weasel's tail here.
The typical C.E.O. legal defense — and it's a good one — is to place the blame on plain old massive incompetence, not on evil. If I end up on the jury for one of those trials, I'll be torn. On the one hand, I'm predisposed to believing that executives are indeed clueless. But on the other, I'm enough of a weasel to vote guilty just to watch a C.E.O. cry. I lost a lot of money on Enron, Tyco and WorldCom. (Yes, I owned stock in all three.) So I might enjoy being a juror on one of those cases. I might even volunteer. And when I sign in to the jury room each morning, I'll steal the pen, because frankly, I deserve it.
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Scott Adams, a cartoonist, is the author of the forthcoming "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel." |
