As many ideas do, this one came to me around midnight, after I had worked on other projects, and my mind was wandering. As many of us have done, I’ve made mistakes, and was thinking what those mistakes had on me. Obviously I cant know what a mistake is, but looking back with perspective, I can think about what is right and wrong. That looking back on previous events, and thinking about it made me think, “What makes a man a ‘good man’?” Is it our responses to those actions as they are happening? Is it future actions we make, with the perspective we have gotten, or are we bound to staying mostly the same?
When I thought of this idea, I was unsure about the response to many of those questions. So my thought process about the idea, was to ask our newspaper’s ‘Resident’ editorial writer, if he would work on a collaborative editorial set, with myself and another student, answering those questions, and trying to give our perspective on what makes a man a “good man”.
I was born in 2001, almost exactly 5 months before 9/11 happened, in India. I was third born, in a set of four brothers. I grew up there until I was 12, before moving to the US. As a kid, curiosity dominated my brain. I was reading all the time, and taking things apart, trying to see how they work, and even if I didn’t understand it then, that curiosity stuck with me, into the career I am going into. One of the potential few careers I want to work in, is investigative reporting, and try and dive deep into an issue, and see how it affects people. I think part of it, was that I was the third born, and had a younger brother five years after I was born, so much of what I remember of being a child was having good parents, but having to figure out my own entertainment, and a lot of that was pushed into reading, and learning through books. Another major element, that pushed me down the path that taught me what I should be like was scouting. Its something my father did, something my older brothers, and when I was a kid I thought I thought it was just natural I would join. I will freely admit I am biased, At the point of writing this article, I was in scouting for over a decade, and earned the rank of Eagle. That’s why the first thing that pops into my head, when I think of someone who is a good man, is someone that follows the scout law, and oath.
However, I know that many people didn’t go into scouting, and it didn’t have any effects on them, apart from community outreach, that they might have seen. So, I want to dive deep into why I think of the scout law and oath when I think of someone who is a “good man”. But many of the things I did in scouting, helped make me the man I am, and it did give much-needed experience and a place to make mistakes, and learn from them, before going into the real world.
Scouting really helped give me structure in life. The requirements were set, and very plainly written. The requirements are outdoor focused for the first ‘half’ of the program, up to First Class. They teach you basic skills that will be helpful in life, like “Help plan a menu, that includes one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner, and requires cooking for at least two of these meals.” and then “Using the menu you created, make a list, showing budget, and food amount needed for feeding three members of your patrol.”
Those requirements taught me how to live a life, without worrying about the basics like cooking, and shopping lists, but the second ‘half’ of scouting taught me how to be the ‘good’ man that I am now. From the Star Scout rank to Eagle Scout rank, it was teaching you how to put the skills you learned in the first four ranks and teaching it to those below you in scouting. You would take on more and more leadership roles, and start moving to Merit Badges which are hyper-specific badges you can learn, that are essentially deep dives into that subject. Things like personal finance, personal fitness, citizenship in the community, the nation, and the world, alongside a plethora of others you can go into. While the ranks and merit badges taught me helpful skills, its the servant leadership aspect that really helped shape me.
As it is in life, in scouting you take on more and more responsibilities the further you go. The further you go in scouting, the more you have to think about not only the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of solving problems and planning, but the ‘why?’ as well. And that sort of thinking as a teenager, is why I think of the scout oath and law when I think of what being a man is. A lot of the answers, both in scouting and in life, can be brought back to those two topics. You’re going shopping? The Scout law says you should be thrifty. You’re going to an interview? You should be trustworthy, and courteous to those around you, because you’ll never know who you’ll run into on your way to the interview.
And regardless of what you do, you should do your best to do your duty to god and your country, because when you serve something larger then yourself, you truly learn who you are. I shall end this rambling of what makes a good man, with two quotes. The concepts of the quotes helped shape what I think a ‘great man’ is, and I hope that they might help those that are reading. One for MLK, and one from Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” and Martin Luther King Jr. said “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.”
Editors Note: This article is part of a series on what makes a man, a “good man” and is a matter of perspective from the writer. Its all their perspective on how they got to their thought process on what a good man is, or what a good man looks like. To read the rest of the series, please click here.
