Tag: responsibility

Day 23 Lenten Meditation: Freedom



I highly doubt the person at the Unitarian Universalist Church who created these daily meditations counted on COVID-19 and social isolation. For the sake of our fellow humans, we have forsaken our freedom to congregate in groups and socialize in mass events. Freedom, it seems, is defined by not having it.

In these days, we realize that freedom has a cost. Those who speak about the military say “Freedom is not always free”. What they’re missing is that freedom is never free. Freedom to congregate in the days of Novel Coronavirus means the virus will spread faster. Freedom of choice at the supermarket leaves us bewildered. And freedom to choose weapons that can kill tens of people in minutes costs society many more innocent lives. 

If we have freedom, we have responsibility to others. A free market economy requires corporate responsibility to customers and workers, which doesn’t always happen, thus the need for laws. The freedom to bear arms requires responsibility to keep those guns from the hands of children, which sadly fails too many times. We do not handle our freedoms well.

I hadn’t expected this to be such a somber reflection. We usually talk about freedom in lofty terms in the US, leaving the costs of freedom on the shoulders of soldiers who fight for American interests. But we all have a responsibility to make decisions for the whole about how much freedom we should allow.

Day 8 Reflection: Mistakes

When I was in college long ago, I dated an engineering student. I remember telling my mother at the end of the semester that he had gotten a D in his differential equations class. 

“Does he know what he did wrong?” she asked.

I told her he had no idea why he’d gotten the grade.

“That’s too bad,” she noted. “He won’t be able to fix it if he doesn’t know.” 

People don’t like admitting their mistakes. It’s easy to assign an external factor to failure — the teacher hates me, the instructions were too difficult. But without admitting mistakes, one can’t work out the solution.

Sometimes mistakes can be catastrophic. A few days ago, something caused a deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Ethiopia, the second such crash with a 737 MAX 8 in six months. Several countries’ airlines have quit flying the model in the belief that a mechanical failure took down the craft. One of the holdouts, and the country that flies the most 737 MAX 8 aircraft, is the US. One hopes that the US isn’t trying to cover up a catastrophic mistake by an American company with false confidence.

We have a crisis of responsibility in leadership because of the inability of people to admit making mistakes. Politicians pass blame to others or make equivocal statements: “Mistakes were made.” They fear that taking responsibility for mistakes will alarm the electorate, who don’t like admitting their own mistakes. This leads to the crisis — taking responsibility for mistakes is the sign of a true leader, one who is willing to learn for the sake of her constituents, yet leaders present themselves with a flawless facade for the sake of electability.

We need to admit our mistakes to learn from them, to fix them, to grow and to become wise.