Integrity is something that now-a-days seems way to hard to find in another person.

I blame technology/Social Media for this character trait gone M.I.A in 21st Century DNA… Well partly at least.

It has just become incredibly too easy for us to simply bailout on plans or even call someone back. Now, we can just shoot the person a quick text or tag them in a short tweet. Then, BOOM, like magic, you’re off the hook, and seemingly guilt-free at that. What happens when the person (someone that is supposed to be your friend) has been extremely excited to hang out, and has spent his/her entire day planning to hang out… finally reads his/her texts, or even worse, sees you are an hour late and finally gets on Twitter and sees your lame attempt at canceling plans?

I don’t know, I may not be an “integrity expert,” but I’ve been ditched by enough people in the past that when I meet someone now, integrity is one of the first things I look for. When I grew up, if I said I was going to do something, I better have made sure it got done. Kind of goes hand-in-hand with being honest, really. 

I also grew up, for the first 13 years of my life, doing club gymnastics. For those that don’t know, this sport teaches a lot about integrity. Well, it teaches young girls a lot of valuable lessons actually. I could probably write an article dedicated to the sport alone. Common courtesy for canceling on anyone or anything is at least 24 hours in advance, however 48 hours is ideal. So why not show your “friends” the same courtesy, or your employer, or your professor? 

Integrity is a strong trait to have/acquire. It’s strong because in order to truly be able to say you are a person with integrity, I believe you also have to acquire the strings attached to the trait as well. The unspoken strings, if you will; like punctuality, honesty, and most importantly a (most of the time deafening) guilty conscience.             

Being one of these few people myself, that thinks I'm (for the most part) a person with great integrity, I know first hand what it’s like to have to deal with a very obnoxious conscience. I do not like displeasing others when it comes to my words and actions. I’m not surprised or exaggerating a bit when I tell you that nine times out of ten, you can tell how much integrity another person actually has by how “in-tune” he/she is with his/her personal conscience—And about that same percentage of people say they have integrity and don’t really even know what the word means… 

Educate yourselves people. We all deserve the best. We all have the ability to be educated and not only that, but what kind of world do you think we will all live in if we just arrogantly continue to think we are the best and know everything, without even using our resources in technology to personally educate ourselves outside of classes? I don’t know, I’m just sayin’. With the ability to learn so much from the world; it’s almost unforgivable to still be college adults leading with the excuse, “I don’t know what that word means.” Especially a word like, “integrity”. 

So hopefully, we all know the true meaning by now, and won’t five any of us with the trait, false hope when we get told another person has great integrity, when in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth. I may be a little passionate on the subject, but I felt I needed to use this week’s “Editor’s Note” as sort of a Public Service Announcement. 

Thanks for reading, and until next week, my little Wizards of OD.