Integrity

I guess I have reached middle age. Many of the things I used to do have changed from how I used to do them. For instance I’m a little slower getting in and out of a car. The body just doesn’t fold as easy as it used to. But the changes that really bother me are the continued disintegration of the social fabric around us.

Now I spend a little more time looking around to make sure people are acting safe. If there is trouble, I still go help out. A stranded motorist, for example, I’ll stop and see if they need a hand. At the stop light, I look carefully when it turns green before proceeding across the intersection. Mostly that’s minor stuff.

At work I often have to struggle through contract negotiations. It’s a painful process because many people have been bitten by some odd thing and so they’ve put on their attorney hat and written a contract. Many of their stipulations I simply can’t sign because I cannot agree or guarantee what they’re asking. So we end up going back and forth trying to get to a place where I’m respecting their wishes and needs, and they are asking reasonable things that I can guarantee.

The overall point, though, is that these little things add up to tremendously wasted time. It takes a lot more energy to do simple things than it used to. I do not think our “leaders” think about this when they’re adding ridiculous constraints to business. We get laws, and rules, and policies, and procedures, and processes, all requiring just a little tiny bit more energy.

Eventually that crashes. The energy required to do something simply becomes too much. We find alternate paths and different ways to do things. So it may seem that a simple push to “green energy,” a typical gross distortion of truly green energy by crazed leftists, is a good thing, when the net impact could very well require more energy than before.

I wish for the simpler days, when yes meant yes, and no meant no. Integrity is a key factor to more efficient society.