Loyalty

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band--"Be True (live)" (mp3)

This is, without apology, a rant driven by a coach leaving and his new school and a feeling of betrayal and all of that that happened tonight.

And, it is written by someone who has worked at the same place for 26+ years, which, I realize, in 2010, is ungodly weird.

Is there no loyalty in the world anymore?

Believe me, I'm not naive. I know all about opportunity and advancement and wanting to climb the ladder or to be the best or to maximize one's potential. I know that these are All-American values preached all the way from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

But, seriously, is loyalty a dead concept?

Perhaps I should go back and find a definition. After all, what is loyalty? Merriam-Webster defines "Loyalty" as "the quality or state or an instance of being loyal." Which is completely un-fucking-helpful. So, on we go, following the link to "Fidelity," which the same site defines as "faithfulness to something to which one is bound by pledge or duty."

And, yeah, that will do the job for us, won't it?

My first problem is this: half of me believes that an institution that treats one well deserves loyalty, and half of me believe that it doesn't. Because, after all, it is an institution, and, as such, is an unfeeling, somewhat intangible entity whose name is invoked mainly in an attempt to inspire loyalty.

My second problem is this: when we throw out the concept of an institution, we are left with people--players or students or colleagues or whomever is impacted by an early departure. Because that's what disloyalty is about, isn't it? It isn't that someone leaves; it's that that person leaves before his or her time.

Once upon a time, there was a Spanish teacher at this school who left at mid-year to bicycle his way through South America. He was a likeable enough guy, I guess, and people would want to give me updates about him. "Not interested," I would say, "He is dead to me." Those people would look at me surprised. "He left his students hanging in the middle of the year to go biking in South America," I would say, "I have no respect for that at all." And I didn't. And I don't. There is an unspoken agreement that a teacher will hang with his or her students for a year, come Hell or high water.

What goes through your head when you screw other people in order to do what is best for you? Does the money make it okay? Do you tell yourself it was the chance of a lifetime and that you had to take it? Do you tell yourself that it was God's will? What other lies can the mind conjure up?

I fear that, in America, unspoken agreements aren't effective anymore, because if they are unspoken, if they are not on paper, perhaps notarized, able to be upheld in a court of law, then they don't mean anything at all. If so, that is very, very sad. That means that unless you hold me to it, unless it was written into my contract, then I am in no way bound to honor it.

I believe that when you take on a team, a class, a job, you see it through until it is completed, at least until you meet some open-to-interpretation definition of completed. You don't have to win the title or anything, but you do have to make the things right that weren't right when you took whatever it was on. If you were hired to do a specific job, then you stay with that job until the person that hired you is reasonably satisfied. Not everything in this life is immediate. Not every opportunity comes at us in such a way that we have act now or forever regret it. No, there are plenty of opportunities that arise exactly because we stuck with something that maybe people didn't think we would stick with. Yeah, we came back for our senior year or, yeah, we helped return a program to its winning ways, or, yeah, we finished out the school year, or, yeah, someone simply asked us to do something for x amount of time and we were true to our word.

That's loyalty. And that's right.

I stumbled across the live Bruce at Addicted To Vinyl.com. Great site.