Wednesday; October 16

Police officers arrested for homicide ... school staff dismissed for inappropriate contact with students ... prosecutors charged with driving while intoxicated ... ministers convicted of embezzlement ... doctors accused of over prescribing opioids.  It wouldn’t take much looking on social media or on news outlets to find these headlines.  On one hand, we might wish that someone would merely report on the good things the folks in these professions were doing, but, the most basic desire is that these headlines would go away because people stopped doing them!  Sure, sometimes someone with a personal agenda falsely accuses good people and other times an entity with an axe to grind will over-report these incidences, but in all honesty when these types of thing happen, they should be addressed and our communities should be informed.
          The reason I bring up these sensitive topics is that the best way to deal with these things is through a very simple, morally effective two-pronged approach:
1.  People in positions of authority need to stop doing bad things.  Each one of us has to make a decision about the lives are going to live.  If we refuse to follow the rules, then we should get out of areas of public trust.
2.  Professions need to be on the frontlines of policing themselves.  If these stories were merely fodder for disreputable scandal-sheets or paybacks for disgruntled people we might call-out the reporters, but when they are actually happening, our first course of action needs to be to clean up our mess.  Rather than trying to hide (or excuse) the bad apples, we should be the ones at the forefront of eradicating them from our bunch.
          As long as people are involved in professions, there will be problems.  However, let’s do our best to keep our noses and our environments clean.
Think About It!

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