Equality or Excellence?

We lack experts, specifically those able to recognize excellence and instill it as a standard. We still have attempts, a step better than sullen resignation, but they are mostly phoned in and rarely criticized or dismissed even when far off the mark, hanging around as if somehow able to make a beneficial contribution, and because of that longevity, eventually accepted as a legitimate part of the community's exemplifying efforts.

"Honor", "Accountability", "Integrity" -- these and related ideals held fast in civilization until hippie demons began gnawing on their meaning, questioning their purpose, mocking their advocates, undermining their world view, and with that victorious assault leaving the words archaic and laughable. The concepts they beheld had to die similarly, no longer tenable in a world too progressive to be restrained by reason or outcome.

And then to lay a defeated word stripped bare on the campus grounds to be walked over without an appropriate epitaph for reference of what it once meant, maintained, and inspired? Students left to modern texts will have no means to make sense of these ideas. That is failed instruction worse than literal lectures or sermons. No expert would make such a mistake, nor allow others to entertain that kind of failed architectural design, unless it was specifically to demonstrate the undertaking of bad decisions. Now that the error has been taken and affirmed, one cannot easily correct its flawed design and then explain to insect media the decision for the removal of honor, accountability, and integrity from the campus grounds -- in any case, symbolic words now emptied of their meaning and strength, ruins from an older generation that suicided and bequeathed no inheritance after an exhaustive frittered life of indulgent vainglory.