Revisiting The High Standard

If he wrote about it before I did I suppose I must say I agree with the Colonel, otherwise he would be agreeing with me This also might help to explain why I tend to be a generally happy person.

In July 2004, Col. Cooper wrote:

The pursuit of excellence has long been our guiding principle, both professionally and personally. Since happiness is the byproduct of accomplishment, the search for excellence in both major and minor things is the key to happiness.

And this presents a social problem. If you do things well in the classroom, on the playing field or on the battlefield, you will be doing things better than some of those around you. This tends to frost the majority. You know this and the majority knows this. This makes you unpopular - "stuck up" is the term we used to use in school. This may or may not make you an "elitist," depending upon whether you flaunt it or attempt to discredit it. Modesty is a pleasant social attribute, but when overdone it can be rather silly. When a soldier is awarded his medal of honor or when a prima donna minimizes her extra bow, it is fatuous for him or her to pretend that what was accomplished was trivial. Excellence is not trivial. Excellence may be "elitist," as the Countess suggests. It may not be achieved by everyone, but it may be striven for by everyone, successfully or otherwise. In teaching so-called "Senior Problems" in high school, I used to present Kipling's great poetic exhortation "If." I remember a student approaching me after class one day complaining that the standards set forth in the verse were just too high for reasonable aspiration. My response was that while in truth the standards set forth might be unachievable, they were not unapproachable. All of us may not meet that standard, but every one of us can try to meet that standard, and ought to do so.