Posted on: Friday, January 3, 2003

Remember, the honor is to serve

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

In these first few days of the new year, when we're deep into a time of evaluation and re-evaluation, counting up what we did and didn't do, and setting goals for what we will and won't do from now on, perhaps it's time to pull out of storage a notion that has become old-fashioned and nostalgic: the idea of "duty."

There was a time when duty was a golden thing, something each person, child and adult, contemplated most seriously and committed to most earnestly. Duty was something you were proud to have, something you were happy to do. It was a badge you wore, not a burden you carried or a punishment you avoided.

For a time, duty was the value that underscored the best movies and the most-loved stories. It was a word that went hand and hand with another word you don't hear enough of anymore: honor.

But somehow, it fell out of fashion. The focus on what each of us is supposed to do to take care of ourselves, our families, our communities and our world flipped to a culture of entitlement. Now, we spend too much time fixating on what we are owed by our families, our communities, by the entire world.

We live in an age and a time when duty is something we shove upon others. Some perfectly capable adults don't even think it is their duty to take care of themselves. They expect that job to fall to other people. But that framework doesn't serve very well. There's not a single soul who sees the world that way who can claim any sort of peace and happiness.

In contrast, those who are most productive and genuinely joyful are the ones who have embraced their duty in life, who live to serve, who serve with dignity.

On the first day of the year, I watched a neighbor run two extension cords together so he could take his shop-vac far into the street. He was cleaning up the firecracker paper and various pyrotechnic shrapnel from the front of his house, in front of the next house and in front of as many more houses as his two extension cords would reach. Such a small thing, yet meaningful. This man had the means to clean up the mess, even though it wasn't all his own mess, and so he simply did it. Perhaps all that stuff would have just blown into his yard anyway, so maybe he was operating on experience and saving himself later work. But the point is that he cleaned it up. He didn't hassle the neighbors to take care of it. He didn't call the city to complain. He didn't wait for the wind to blow it away or for the rain to melt it into the asphalt.

If we all make a collective resolution to expand our definition of duty and to fulfill our duty with the pride and honor of our grandparents' generation, we would have a lot more than clean streets.

As we make our resolutions, we should consider the profound impact each of us can have if only we see it as our responsibility, and our proud privilege, to serve.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.