It’s a crying shame what lying has become in society. Deceit and pain become trivial in the presence of personal gain, and personally I think that’s lame.

Whatever happened to living truthfully and honestly? Whatever happened to compassion and sincerity? It seems like dishonorable motives and hidden agendas have come to s dominate the way people are conducting their business (and not like corporate business, I mean more like personal conduct).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for personal gain. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be typing away right now trying to appeal to you. However, there is always a good way and a bad way go about conducting yourself. This is not to get confused with doing something right or wrong. Those adjectives are becoming increasingly irrelevant, but more on that later.

To do good things would mean (I think) to develop yourself in a way that promotes the overall development of the people around you. To do bad things would be to develop yourself at the expense of those around you. But what difference would it make if I chose to conduct myself badly? Quite a great deal actually.

You see, the consequences of our actions speak volumes more than what you (or anybody else, really) are willing to admit. If you succeed in life due to selfishness and deceit, the people who have been affected by your ill doings will start to believe that they too must act badly to be successful (a gross overgeneralization, I’m aware). The chain effect would carry this sentiment outside of your immediate social circle, and would soon corrupt those who are too easily swayed by what other people are doing. The end result might be a society similar to the one in the movie Idiocracy.

Granted, it seems nigh impossible to do the good thing, or behave in a good way, all the time. After all, we are humans and wanton for digressions. Furthermore, the good thing is often difficult to follow through with, if not difficult to know at all. Anything that is too good to be true is often very detrimental. We can get easily confused when life presents so many choices, but here’s a general rule of thumb: anything worth doing in life is never easy, anything that is easy is almost never worthwhile in the long run.

Complaining is easy. Taking advantage of others is easy. Being dishonest, disrespectful, deceitful and disloyal don’t take much effort. Being compassionate is hard. Being modest is hard. Being humble, sincere, thoughtful and trustworthy are not easy tasks, but it’s safe to assume that the payback is much more substantial than the alternative.

This is what separates a successful chapter from one on the brinks of despair. If the leaders in your house intimidate to garner support, if the general membership is constantly putting each other down at their own expense, if members are disregarded and discouraged from speaking their mind, you may find that you won’t have a chapter for very long.

If the leaders in your house encourage constructive criticism and welcome innovative ideas, if the membership is involved and supportive of each other, and if everyone’s voice has the opportunity to be heard, then your chapter is doing what it was meant to do (which is still nothing short of miraculous). But I’m an old fuddy-duddy with nothing else to write about other than what I can fish for in the deepest depths of my mind. ASGF.