Professional Soldiers ® - 'The Importance of Character'

The following is an excellent article about character and liberty. The opening paragraphs are posted below.

Quote:

Twenty years ago, something quite remarkable happened in the little town of Conyers, Georgia — a town like Joplin in so many ways: full of salt-of-the-earth, self-reliant and patriotic citizens though about one quarter your size in population. When school officials there discovered that one of their basketball players who had played 45 seconds in the first of the school’s five post-season games had actually been scholastically ineligible, they returned the state championship trophy the team had just won a few weeks before. If they had simply kept quiet, probably no one else would have ever known about it and they could have retained the trophy.

To their eternal credit, the team and the town, dejected though they were, rallied behind the school’s decision. The coach said, “We didn’t know he was ineligible at the time … but you’ve got to do what’s honest and right and what the rules say. I told my team that people forget the scores of the games; they don’t ever forget what you’re made of.”

In the minds of most, it didn’t matter that the championship title was forfeited. The coach and the team were still champions — in more ways than one. Could you have mustered the courage under similar circumstances to do as they did?

Commencement addresses at both high schools and colleges are full of paeans and platitudes that reduce to one cliché: “You are the future.” Well, that’s an important point but it’s also something we already know because it’s pretty self-evident, wouldn’t you say? So I’ll not tell you in a dozen different ways that the future is yours. I have a different message.

I want to talk to you about one thing that is more important than all the good grades you’ve earned, more important than all the high school and college degrees you’ll accumulate, and indeed, more important than all the knowledge you’ll ever absorb in your lifetimes. It’s something over which every responsible, thinking adult has total, personal control and yet millions of people every year sacrifice it for very little. It will not only define and shape your future, it will put both a concrete floor under it and an iron ceiling over it. It’s what the world will remember you for more than probably anything else. It’s not your looks, it’s not your talents, it’s not your ethnicity and ultimately, it may not even be anything you ever say. What is this incredibly powerful thing I’m talking about? In a word, it’s character...

http://fee.org/articles/importance-character/