By Jack Buta P.M.
Saturday night is the absolute worst time to discover that you have nothing to read, yet there I was pawing through my collection of books at 9:30 in the evening searching for something, anything to distract me until Monday. I had been looking for about ten minutes and was into the old paperbacks that somehow never got donated to the VA hospital, when I came across my little collection of Ayn Rand Books. I selected the thickest volume and read the title, Atlas Shrugged. It had to be one of the first books I bought after arriving in this country. The copyrite was dated 1957 and the printed retail price was $1.50 for a 1000 page volume set in 6 point type.
As I began to read I realized in many ways this book could have been written today. The story begins with the conflict between a brother, the CEO of a railroad who is incapable of making decisions and his sister who is striving desperately to save it from bankruptcy. Their struggle is played out against the background of a world in which leadership and initiative have been replaced with deniability and total abrogation of personal responsibility. People in what was once the greatest country in the world had lost not only hope but the will to even look for answers. We can’t do this or that because, it just isn’t right. Making money or becoming a success is no longer a good reason to invest one’s time and effort. Things will work out, they always have.. None of this is my fault nor is it my responsibility to change things. Who is John Galt?
Like I said, she could have written this book in 2009 rather than a half-century ago.
How is it we never seem to learn from our past mistakes?
Just one year ago the greed of Wall Street bankers created a world wide economic meltdown and then had the gall to demand that the victims of this disaster bail them out to the tune of almost a Trillion Dollars. Today these same people are back ripping off their rescuers as if the collapse never happened, or if it did, it was certainly not their fault. What a shining example of a total lack of personal and corporate responsibility.
In our governments, politicians have insulated themselves from their citizens with generous full pay retirement plans and the very best medical care imaginable. They play party politics while the majority of their citizens struggle to keep their homes and go without any health insurance.
Every empire or civilization has always fallen when its leaders exhibit the same lack of personal responsibility. Yet when we look around today all we see from our elected representatives is the politics of plausible denial and being politically correct. Two or three generations ago our government had plenty of Freemasons working for the good of their fellow citizens. Today, there is scarcely a handful anywhere.
For over three hundred years the independent thinkers of Freemasonry led the world by teaching these basic life skills of leadership, self-respect and living to a higher moral and ethical standard. Passing along these skills and evaluating our past in preparation for our future is the reason why we founded the Freemason Academy.
How did we get to this place and how can we dig ourselves out?
First we need those in our Fraternity who have the skills to begin teaching the moral and ethical precepts of Freemasonry. Then we need to encourage honorable men to take back their country at the ballot electing men not because they belong to one party or another but because they exhibit the same moral and ethical characteristics inculcated in our ancient Philosophies
The very essence of our Masonic philosophy is based on being servant leaders by rolling up our sleeves and leading from the front instead of complaining from the rear. For more than three hundred years Freemasons have never hesitated to put aside their own safety and welfare to go to the aid of a Brother in distress. They have defended their own country and fought to keep it free from despots and tyrants. They fought alongside Bolivar to free South America, and Garibaldi to unite Italy, and Washington in North America. Military leaders have turned to Freemasonry to teach leadership skills to their officer corps. As much as these skills have been needed in the past there has never been a time when they were more important than today.
Over 50 years ago in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote about the death and rebirth of man’s spirit. At the Academy we teach the rebirth of the Masonic spirit.