Delighting In Sacrifice

What a concept

 

I’ve written before about the cohesion created when we, as citizens, share in sacrifice.

Everyone alive during WW2 knew at least one person who was fighting the Nazis and Japan. And even those not fighting, shared in the spirit of sacrifice by giving up “wants” and sometimes even “needs.”

Everyone bought war bonds. Women by the millions served their nation in factories or as nurses or pilots flying domestic planes.

And during the Great Depression, before WW2, everyone knew someone who had lost a job, who needed a hand up or a hand-out, and so they helped, working at soup kitchens, feeding the hungry.

I remember my grandmother telling stories about the 1930s, about inviting desperate men who knocked on doors offering to do odd jobs, into her home, and feeding them, whether she had work for them to do or not.

Sadly, today the idea of sharing in the sacrifice of our active duty military families is foreign, the notion of helping the homeless, the desperate, quaint.

And it applies to our industry too.

Most are asked to accept lower salaries while CEOs and board members are paid millions and millions even when they fail at their businesses.

When jobs are cut, you rarely see those in upper management take one for the team, certainly not in Radio.

So I thought you might enjoy THIS PERSPECTIVE.

I hope it has the power to change our behavior, that our leaders, for the first time in a long, long time, ask us here, safe at home, in our BMWs and gated communities, to step up and share in the sacrifices borne by so many not in our social circles.

It’s time.