Louis Roney: Pledging and hedging

My parents used to say that nothing of mine was worth more than my word. A broken word is a broken promise, and a promise should never be given lightly. If a pledge you have made has no value, what else about you is worth a damn?

Of course, people have reasons to change their plans—and can do so by addressing them promptly and forthrightly.

“But I have promises to keep,” said great poet Robert Frost in his thoughtful poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

When I was 19 or 20, I often looked at Robert Frost as he talked with colleagues a couple of tables away in the Eliot House dining room at Harvard. I wondered what promises he had made, and whether he had managed to keep them.

Frost was a troubled man. His daughter’s recent suicide weighed heavily upon him. His happy young “birch swinging days” were lost in an amiable past. Steadfastly, Frost kept faith with the ideals that ruled his life and his art.

Do people today thoughtlessly and more easily break promises they have made than they used to? Such an attitude as, “I’ll promise now, and deal with it later “ often lacks character, and carries little worth.

Among the seasoned political prevaricators one meets nowadays, Ananias would have to strain his imagination to make the second team.

When Jimmy Carter asked, “Would I lie to yah?” was he consciously giving the answer to his own question? What was the public’s immediate knee-jerk response to Jimmy?

Richard Nixon said to the nation about Watergate and the cover-up, “Your president is not a crook,” therewith providing the U.S. with the fitting title for its president — and making Nixon’s veracity even more questionable!

George Washington’s, “I can not tell a lie,” would bring derisive snorts if said today.

President Obama’s pronouncements currently seem to carry little weight. Is his latest statement that Syria has “stepped over the line” by using chemical weapons against its populous a valid threat? How long will it be until Obama begins to hedge his bets to get himself off the hook?

“A man’s word is his bond,” is viewed by too many people today as antediluvian pap.

I worked as an opera singer in Germany where a verbal “Zusage” (agreement) on the telephone was as binding as a signed contract. Woe to the artist who failed to live up to a “Zusage.” He or she would be quietly ‘blackballed’ by the Theater Directors Association, and never again be employed by anyone in the German theater system.

The Germans are probably no more moral in this respect than anyone else. But they have learned that it’s not possible to run an enormous system of opera and playhouses if everyone involved doesn’t keep his word fastidiously.

If one is to believe our newspaper and broadcast media, corruption has become the way of life at almost every economic and educational level in America. We read that cheating on exams has become a national phenomenon — even in such sacrosanct institutions as Annapolis and West Point.

“Truth in advertising?” Are you kidding? What kind of naïf are you anyhow? As someone commented to me the other day, “Who can you trust nowadays?”

No matter what else of value a friend, colleague or mate may have, if you cannot count on his word, what have you got? Sand that runs through your fingers! If “the truth shall set you free,” bondage seems to be the state of mind of a large percentage of the modern world.