I read an interesting news item two weeks ago, and tucked it away for future use. Yesterday afternoon, while trying to beat the heat in Montana – 20 degrees above normal and no air conditioners – I retrieved the item to share with you.
It’s about a travel agency in Russia. It’s a travel agency that was determined to make money. Even when they were having serious financial trouble, they didn’t give up. So far, so good, right? Everyone likes to see determination. A business that employs ingenuity to keep from going out of business is presumed to have good leaders.
Character prefers integrity above all else, though, and these business people sacrificed integrity for the sake of getting ahead. What did they do?
They began to sell fake vacations.
Freely, openly, they will take your cash and give you a counterfeit vacation. But what’s the value in that? Who would purchase such a vacation?
Apparently, plenty of people want bragging rights to a holiday they cannot afford. Plenty of people want excuses for an otherwise unexplainable absence from home. For whatever reason, enough Russians want fake vacations that this travel agency is in the black again.
Let’s say you have two weeks off work, and you have nothing planned. At best, you will drive the family to a local recreation site, maybe camp for a weekend, and return home. You just don’t have the money to do much more. Not that you wouldn’t like to do something grandiose. You’d love to return to work with photos of yourself climbing Mount Fuji in Japan. You’d love to make people think you’d been boxing kangaroos in Australia. You’d even settle for trekking New Zealand, with nighttime sightings of the kiwi bird.
Whatever your pleasure, this travel agency will sacrifice integrity, both theirs and yours, to help you achieve the hoax. They will provide you with vacation vouchers, ticket stubs, forged hotel receipts, doctored photos, and even souvenirs for your unfortunate stay-at-home friends. You can sit at home the whole time, but “prove” you had a great holiday.
Character prefers integrity, though. Men and women of character will exercise integrity rather than attempt to impress others. They will help young children in their care learn, as Jeremy Rabbit learned, that integrity and honesty are valuable character traits, and should be embraced tightly. They should be exercised constantly and consistently. They should never be laid aside for a fake vacation or any other fakeness.
Certainly, we may have to sit on the sidelines while someone else brags about the amount of money they spent and the wonderful time they had spending it. We may have to remain silent as we look at dozens of photos they took while pursuing their adventure holiday. We will not, however, have to look in the mirror and see a fake who pretended a holiday trip simply for the sake of making a big impression.
Character prefers integrity, from one moment of life to the next; in every facet of daily life, and in every facet of vacation life.
That’s the view from my chair. What’s your view?