The "I" Word

Several incidents which have occurred recently have made me ask myself what events, exactly, have transpired in the world—since my birth—that could alter values 180╝ from those considered acceptable as recently as, say, 40 years ago.

Seemingly, we are in an entirely different age; it’s the ME generation on steroids—it’s “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” and the “I-Wanna-Maka-Million-Club” rolled into one.

Some words appear to have dropped out of the lexicon entirely. Words like, “conscientious,” “principles,” “integrity,” have all but disappeared and have been replaced by words like “bottom line,” “profit margin,” “resentment,” and “passive-aggressive.”

We live in an entire world of people—rich and poor alike—looking out for their own “bottom line.” It’s the Me-Myself-and-I culture of corporate bandits looking for every opportunity to stick it to consumers; consumers revenging themselves on corporations (sometimes passively) by “sticking it,” indiscriminately, to the next guy in the hope that “the next guy” is one of those corporate robber barons.

Thus, we have fast food hamburger flippers contaminating food stuffs, service people tampering with products they have been hired to repair, and on and on. They all resent the rich guy while, ironically, dreaming of becoming the rich guy. Yet nobody wants to do what the honest rich guy did to get there—work hard, educate themselves, etc. They want the material goods the rich guy has without the labor to acquire it and if they can’t have that, then they will settle for sabotaging “the rich guy” by whatever means are available to them.

In the olden days, say forty or so years ago, the average individual still had scruples (a dirty word, the “S” word) and even if they were screwed by corporate heads, they still had integrity, and would not tarnish that integrity by revenging themselves upon innocent victims. Further, this is no longer true only of the urban rat-race; television, films, and mass media have brought the “rat-race” to the tiniest, most remote villages on planet earth so that now, everyone wants they’re “share of the pie,” or, rather, what they BELIEVE to be their share.

The idea that life is not fair has become a foreign one, perhaps because socialist ideals have convinced humanity that, where one profits all should profit, and conversely, where one suffers all should suffer alike. It is not fashionable, even, to suggest that one make one’s own way in life. Whatever became of the “self-made man,” or the idea of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—ideas that engendered pride in accomplishment.

Thus, low-paid employees revenge themselves on their corporate sponsors by theft of either material goods, or of time on the clock, or by directing their resentment against their employer’s clientele. The idea that if one is not happy at one’s place of employment, one quits and finds a new job, has been replaced with the idea that jobs are birthrights or entitlements which contain no strings, no clauses, and no responsibilities; an individual merely shows up every day and, at the end of the week, collects a pay check. Similarly, the word “earn” is slowly being dropped from our vocabularies from lack of usage.

What all of this boils down to is that somewhere along the line, we have lost our integrity, and worse, the very concept has become another dirty word, the “I” word. The connotation of integrity carries with it the notion of responsibility, the “R” word, another word which is slowly being removed from the language by its lack of usage.