Principle is always inconvenient. Principled positions are very difficult to live up to although they may be easily applied when someone else has to (or had to) make a tough decision. When and where the rubber is meeting the road one must act in some manner because all of the equivocation room has been used up. It is time for action and you are the only one who can make the decision about which way to go. Idealism increases in proportion to the distance from home, it is always easier to say what should be done when you are not in the sighted cross hairs... principles are a real bitch!
I can tell you readers from personal experiences that principles can and do come back to bite you you squarely in your backsides; they can and often do take a huge chunk of flesh when they sink their teeth into your stated principled position on some matter. Your problem and mine at the critical moment in time when that decision has to made is surprisingly quite simple... do you live up to and by the principles that you have claimed publicly to have in the past? Or do you (and I) avoid taking the principled position that we have espoused so loudly in the past? Quite simply do you (and I) stand tall or do we cut and run? Which is going to happen, which position will be taken at that critical moment?
A 2nd problem with principles is that we are NEVER tested just once in life! There will be numerous times over course of our lifetimes that we are forced to face the test of principles. Nor are going to be comforted by the knowledge that there is a set number of times that we will have to face up to the challenge of having our principles tested. Each testing moment come and go. We will be judged as passing or failing by others who were able to stand on the sideline, pontificating on how well we met or failed the challenge, but they did not have to participate in the decision making. It is unfair but it is what it is!
One can claim to be a principled person. One can espouse all of the correct and polite statements but in the end everything comes down to how well your actions match your words. You will have to live your life in such a manner as to not violate the very principles that you espouse, yet, you must be able to live without some sort of rigid certainty that denotes that you have ALL of the correct answers for every possible life situation. There most certainly are some people who have that absolute certainty about them and they are quite often very quick to tell the rest of us what to do and how to do it. However, they also get challenged and have to stand up to the task of making a principled decision just as the rest of us must from time to time.
As a teacher, I have had to help my students from time to time as they faced some difficult decisions in their lives. But when push came to shove, I could only advise. When to the time came to stand and deliver each of these students had to make their own decisions. I am reminded of this because this past weekend I had to make a principled decision based on my stated beliefs before my student could make his own decision. I believe that we both made the correct decisions but over the hours and days that it took to complete the process, there were moments of doubt and concern. In the end neither of us had a choice. We could not avoid standing on principle and doing the right thing.
Sincerely,
Jerome Barber, Ed. D.
Mataw Guro & Grand Master
Independent Escrima-Kenpo-Arnis Associates
