Suicide In A Good Cause

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Back to Hamilton, one more time.  The Founding Fathers were, mostly, not fools.  But, they had a motley of unreliable players among them, and, in the guise of nation-building, found ways to neutralize the damage the self-interested could single-handedly do.

The necessary moves on a political chess board were arcane and difficult, but do-able in extremis.  Alexander Hamilton found himself in a quandary. He despised Thomas "The Thunder" Jefferson, and feared for his impact on the new, but fragile Republic.  His feelings ran deeper, much deeper, in the case of Aaron Burr, a lightweight grandstander who would sacrifice the sacred contract of the Constitution in a New York minute if it served his wants and more base desires.

So, swallowing hard, Hamilton threw his weight and support to Jefferson (but fell short of the votes needed to break the electoral Collge deadlock, which dealt him an emotional, as well as political, setback).

After a generation of political enmity and well-earned name-calling, Burr felt impugned (or "dissed" in contemporaty parlance), and fatally shot Hamilton in a duel.

In our supply chain universe, we stress the criticality of doing the right thing - always.  But, there are and will be moments in which the right thing is something that has the apearance of the wrong thing - and calls for sacrifice in the cause of a greater good.

That's not politicking, nor weasel-wording; it's not being afraid to put oneself in harm's way in order to prevent catastrophe.