Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Abuse of Power

Abuse of Power

Before I come in for the night I have to feed the cats and fill up the wood stove. At last it has gotten cold enough that the fire can’t be stoked before dark and expected to have live coals and heat in the box come morning. If it was just the house I could easily get by filling it twice a day but the garage, while it has insulation, it also sucks up a lot of heat.

I took a nap today and entered into the “Death” mode. I was gone for three hours. Working in the cold the last three days caught up and it was like being hit with a pole axe. (Whatever that is) I am still groggy.

I had a nice conversation with Karen today. Sometimes, once or twice in a lifetime, you meet someone who you can network minds with. She and I are quiet different….duh! And our bio processors, while produced by the same manufacturer, were cranked out in different companies. However, they have the same connectors…. By that I mean we can work on something concurrently and instead of two hand held calculators we become a desk top. It is seamless how we work together and she brings to the table a powerhouse of talent and ability that takes what we are working on to the next level. She is one awesome lady.

I find myself looking forward to the course starting. After reading material from the ports of my students I said “Wow!” In my earlier classes I had a blend of stellar, able and challenged writers. In this one they are all stellar. That doesn’t mean they will assert themselves but it does mean that if they choose to do so they have the ability to accomplish something.

In the military I found that just because somebody could do something was no guarantee that they would….That was so foreign to me. Here I would struggle to become all I could be and I would see those to whom my struggle would have been effortless… fritter away their talents. It is a hard thing to watch but the higher one goes the more common it seems to become. There are worse things however than apathy. People who deliberately try to create turmoil and havoc are in my view even worse examples…When they are smart and eaten up with the wickedness you don’t want to have them anywhere around your life.

I had a boss once who was like that…. When I questioned his behavior on one occasion he told me his motive was simply feeling wicked. We did not hit it off and I retired early. He was one of those talented jerks… The Army is full of them. They rise to the top because of undeniable talent but they have become corrupted and eaten up by the evil along the way. Power is a terrible and corrupting force. The only defense against its corrosive long term effects is humility and a sense of humor and the recollection of who you are and where you came from.

I use the example of someone who is successful in business and begins to commingle corporate and private funds. They lose the ability to separate in their minds the difference between corporate revenues and personal revenues. At a visceral level they probably never made the distinction but they learned the difference in their accounting classes and they know better. The same analogy holds for power. As a person goes up the corporate ladder they begin to think that all the deference and bull they get told is true… That they are truly exceptional and they are free to use corporate power to influence personal matters….Its pitiful on the one hand and disgusting on the other to see brilliant people with such a remedial grasp of fundamental principles.