The Value of Integrity

Bullies, Victims, and Heroes

Integrity is a word we often hear but seldom think about.  I’ve been thinking of it quite a bit lately.  It is a word that describes a person’s character, as in “S/he is a person of integrity.”

“Integrity-the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”

I’m reminded of a traumatic time in our family when I witnessed the difficulties a man can face when his integrity is more important to him than his well-being.

My father was a Navy man.  He joined the Navy against the objections of his father, John Berry, who was not a man to be trifled with.  In those days of the lingering Great Depression, a young man needed the permission of a parent to join the military. To gain his father’s permission to join, he agreed to a bargain.  If he joined the CCC (Civilian Conservation Core), after a year, if he still wanted to join when he came back, his father would allow it. 

Dad took the train from Jackson Mississippi to San Diego, CA, and spent a year planting trees right here on the ridge, at a CCC camp near Butte Meadows.  I have a picture of him leaning against a rail fence hanging on my wall from that time.  When he returned a year later, his father refused to honor the deal.  That was the only time he knew John Berry to break his word. Shortly afterward, Dad announced to his father that he had enlisted in the Navy, informing him the law had changed, and he didn’t need permission anymore. He enlisted and would leave for San Diego in a few days.  That was the only time Dad says he saw his father cry.  World War One was a memory still fresh in his mind. John Berry had betrayed his word to save his son from harm.

Because Dad had done one year of college at Ole Miss, knew some anatomy, and was learning German, after boot camp in San Diego, they put him in the hospital corpse.  They shipped him out to Pearl Harbor Hawaii, where he worked in the Naval Hospital and lived a pretty good life, right up until December 7.  For the next 7 days, he and his colleagues worked day and night without sleep, caring for the casualties of that attack. Most were burn victims.  He recounted many times years later of stacking bodies in the hallways like cordwood because the morgue was not large enough to deal with the many dead.

 A couple of years later they shipped him back to Treasure Island in San Francisco, where he was promoted to Chief Petty Officer and continued working in the X-Ray department.  The Navy was far ahead of private hospitals in the use of that technology.  After a second tour on a troop transport, he was discharged and settled in San Francisco and was looking for a job.  He landed a job interview at San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton.  The Chief radiologist asked him if he could set up an X-ray department there.  He had taken scrupulous notes on the details of what was called “technique”, and he would bring that knowledge to a new department he created and ran.

Twenty years later he was Chief of the X-Ray Department he created, with 35 employees and an X-Ray school where new technicians could be trained.  He even trained my older sister there. This was quite an accomplishment for the son of a rural Mississippi farmer, starting with no money or college degree. 

Then things took a dark turn.  Between 1950 and 1960, through a variety of laws, federal incentives and funding became available to build and operate a convalescent hospital system.  Not unlike what was being done in the mental health field, the government had a plan for how the aging population would be cared for in long-term quasi-hospitals run by doctors and nurses.

A few of the more prominent doctors in the hospital, some of whom were his superiors, were engaging in a criminal enterprise. They were getting into the lucrative convalescent hospital business based on these federal incentives. They built hospitals and used county hospital funds to furnish them and install medical equipment in their private facilities.  It was a fraud on the taxpayers, and my dad learned of it.  When the doctors became aware of this, dad was threatened.  If he didn’t play along and help to cover their tracks, they would find ways to punish him.

Dad didn’t play along, and they punished him.  They took his position away as Chief of the department and assigned him to a desk in the basement near the morgue, with no duties or responsibilities.  He tried to fight back and sought out a lawyer to sue the doctors and the hospital, but because of the money and politics surrounding these powerful people, no lawyer would take the case.  At the climax of his troubles, he had exhausted all of his options. He faced total defeat at the hands of the more powerful and connected. He was stuck in a moral dilemma.  He wouldn’t become a co-conspirator, yet he couldn’t continue to bear being humiliated, and he couldn’t just quit and lose his income and retirement.

I remember one early evening in the kitchen, Dad was explaining to my mom what was happening.  It was the first time I learned what he was going through, and it was the first time I saw my father break down and sob like a baby.  It was such a serious breakdown, given the sensibilities of the 1960s and me being about 10, my aunt drove into town and took all three of us kids to her home in French Camp for a sleepover.  We could see the hospital from her front yard.  It was best, they decided, that the children were shielded from this traumatic situation.

There was one doctor, however, the Chief Medical Administrator who ran the entire hospital, who was not part of the corrupt cabal, but he didn’t stop them, either. First, he transferred my dad to Bret Harte hospital in Murphy’s, which was part of the San Joaquin County Hospital system. Ironically, my dad had spent time there years earlier as a patient recovering from tuberculosis he contracted from a patient.  A couple of years later, the same doctor retired my dad on a medical disability at age 55.  He was fine.  It was a gift.  Dad was free.

In his later years, he took great pleasure in recounting the eventual fate of the criminal doctors.  A couple were in prison, one was a drug addict, another a street-wandering alcoholic, and a couple committed suicide.  He only had to wait a decade or two for justice.

This is a story that has come back to me many times over my adult lifetime, and I’m telling it to you now for a reason.  My father was a man of integrity, and that is something that must be tested.  It only has real value if one holds onto their integrity under stress. My dad was tested and came through with his integrity intact.  I have always respected him for that, but more now than ever.

One difference between most boys and girls is that boys naturally want to break things. Some boys never get over that and become bullies. When they encounter someone with integrity, they want to break it.  Integrity is an obstacle the immoral must overcome.

There is only one way to deal with bullies. You have to stand up to them, somehow. What that means and how you do it is a complicated subject based on particular facts and circumstances.  When bullies learn you have their number, and understand what they’re up to, they can’t stop being a bully. A bully is not inconvenienced by right and wrong when they justify any means to get what they want. 

If you don’t do what they want, you threaten to blow the whistle or refuse to comply with their demands, they must prove they are bigger, stronger, or more powerful than you. They will try to break you.  If demanding your lunch money with a clenched fist an inch from your nose doesn’t work, the bully and a few of his bully friends might ambush you after school in a place that no one can see.  Bullies work to reduce your options to something you don’t want to do, or something worse.

If you surrender without a fight, the bullying never ends. If you don’t surrender, you get hurt, and likely lose the battle.  Keeping your integrity when you get the crap beat out of you, literally or figuratively, is a test.  A person with integrity does not fold their tent and go home when the bullies come for them.

Bullies cannot win against people who refuse to fold their tents. Yes, they may win a battle, but they never win the war.  Even if you fight back and lose, at least you can land a few blows, and that results in a shift of power. Even bullies have to respect integrity, and the rest of the people consider those who stand up to bullies and the adversity they bring, as heroes.

Movies and books are full of stories about bullies and their victims, and tests of personal integrity that end either in heroism or humiliation.  Shawshank Redemption and Home Alone are two wildly different examples of that theme. I have a story about my Dad.  There are countless others. One way to understand heroism is the willingness to fight for your integrity against a more powerful adversary, risking personal harm for a principle you refuse to abandon.

Here is the strange thing about heroes.  No one else can fight the battle for them, even if they want to. Even if you have a big brother willing to step in front of you to take on the battle, integrity only belongs to those who fight their own battles and slay their dragons.

Many of us go through life without ever being tested in this way. Few have even personally faced the choice of fists or lunch money. But we all know of it.  We all have seen it. Life is full of such tests, and you never know how or when your test will come. But everyone loves a hero.  And everyone despises bullies as selfish predators of the weak.

I’m telling you this story for a reason. Some of you will understand why. Others will figure it out soon.