Brooks pleads guilty; what is the cost?

Posted on October 19, 2007 in City Government, Personal thoughts by DM

I was reading about former City Councilman Archie Brooks’s newly minted guilty plea, and a few folks on the Register’s website were commenting about how he had done a lot of good for the community over the years. They were rebutted immediately by those who believed that Brooks’s apparent breaches of the public trust far out-weighed any good he may have done.

And I got to thinking - not necessarily about Mr. Brooks personally, but about anyone who sets out to “do good” by serving the public and/or the community. I had to wonder: if a person spends all that time “doing good” and probably hoping to be remembered for all the good they’ve done, why would they do anything that could possibly come back to compromise what they’ve worked for? Is it arrogance (”This will never be discovered.”)? Or ignorance (”There’s nothing wrong with doing this.”)?

And then I logged in to Bloglines, and Leigha had posted the Parable of the Carpenter - a little story which very precisely stated the exact thought I was trying to express:

Our character is the house we live in and it’s built piece by piece by our daily choices. Deceit, irresponsibility, and disrespect are just like shoddy workmanship. Whenever we put in less than our best and ignore our potential for excellence, we create a future full of creaky floors, leaky roofs, and crumbling foundations.

I don’t share this to chastise any one person. There are many, many examples of people who have fallen victim to their own inability to mind the daily “pieces” that make up their character. I’m just saying, the synchronicity of finding the story when I did, and the beauty of how perfectly the sentiment is stated, gave me pause.

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