This is http://www.essayz.com/a8811091.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %SELFISH SERVANT CARE HELP HEALTH INTEGRITY OTHERS 881109 You cannot take good care of others if you are not healthy. You cannot be healthy if you lack integrity. To be responsive and responsible to others you need to have integrity, be healthy. Take care of your own health, protect your own integrity. Such care is not selfish, it is essential to integrative service. Personal health and integrity is dependent upon the health and integrity of the members of the community. The wealthy who accumulate wealth by withholding it from others undermine the health and integrity of their community. The wealthy who do not contribute to the health and integrity of their community undermine their communal health and integrity, and so undermine their own health, integrity, and fulfillment. The wealthy who do not contribute to the health and integrity of their community do not merit respect. They are poor, and to be pitied for their estrangement, alienation, and lack of love. They lack hope and joy. They do not know what salvation is and avoid it. Self esteem, security, satisfaction and salvation do not lie in achievements, control, possessions, authority or the power to enforce commands. Neither are they found on the way to perfection in religious, ethical, moral or righteous behavior. All kinds of addicts believe otherwise. All kinds of influential addicts and their supportive codependents lack self esteem, self confidence, security, satisfaction, love, hope and joy. They do not know or enjoy salvation. Addicts try to achieve salvation through sophisticated control of people, possessions, authority, power and addictive fixes. Their failures lead to more frantic efforts of the same kind. They do not learn from their mistakes. They cannot recognize, talk about and be honest about their failures. All addicts are influential in disintegrative ways, and many influential and wealthy people are addicts. Such people subtly lead others into addictive organizations and patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. In their roles, as religious and educational leaders addicts undermine people's self esteem. As political and military leaders addicts undermine our security by putting people whom they do not understand on the defensive. As business leaders addicts undermine profits by not learning from their mistakes through open and honest dialogue. Because they lack self confidence leading addicts tend to bluster rather than take creative risks. Because leading addicts feel insecure they are defensive and compulsively concerned with putting on good appearances, no matter what the cost is to honesty, integrity and health. Leading addicts appear to be concerned with health, education, housing, and communal integrity. They are skillful in making themselves look good because they can not admit to and learn from their own mistakes. When society becomes an addict it elects many leaders who are addicted in many ways. We will begin to recover when we understand this and start to deal with the many manifestations of our addictive values. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================