What is honor?

I read a newspaper article a few days ago about a man named Joe Temeczo, a Polish immigrant to the US who died at the age of 86 last month. All his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances thought that he was a pauper, as he earned a living by doing odd jobs and scavenging for junk from doing odd jobs from garbage heaps. He surprised everyone, however, when he left $1,000,000 to remember those who perished in the World Trade Center bombings of September 11. To me, he is another example of an honorable man.

What is honor? Is it the same as prestige? Is it the same as glory? Is it synonymous to recognition and applause?

Honor is such a difficult concept to define. Many would think that honor is when you are given recognition for the things that you do. But this cannot always be true. We recognize characters in history such as Adolf Hitler and yet he cannot be categorized as being "honorable." On the other hand, Mother Teresa is an honorable woman because she worked with lepers, and later AIDS victims in Calcutta, when no one wanted to deal with them. What she did was not "prestigious" in the accepted sense of the word. For how can it be prestigious to live with the "great unwashed?"

When I won the Palanca Awards for the Kabataan Essay Category two years in a row, everyone said I brought "honor" to my school and my family. I still do not know what this means. All I did was share what I believed in my essays. "Honor" and recognition were the farthest things from my mind. Just like in sports, where we party when we win, and we party just as hard when we lose, I thought that, well, "I’ll just give it my best shot and see what happens." In the end, I know I am still the old "me."

I attended the Youth Leadership Seminar in Singapore about five months ago, and what we discussed just served to validate what I already knew. Just like leadership is not a position but a duty, honor is not something, which comes out as an offshoot of a position. Rather, it is a creed to live by. Character is not doing what people merely want you to do; it is standing up for what you believe in. Service is not a simple act of doling out charity. It is an endeavor in which the goal should be to empower. If I were to relate this to simple mathematical terms, where if A=B and B=C, then A=C; a true leader is that person described in my brother’s university: S/he is the wo/man for others.

To live "honorably", one must allow others to live honorably as well. It is to do things because you believe in its innate goodness, and not because you will derive prestige from it. One of my brother’s best friends, Ami, taught in Cambodia this year for volunteer service. My brother, on the other hand, will stand for what he believes in – no mincing of words. Ami and my brother are my idea of what honorable people in my generation are.

Personally, I think that charity is different from sharing. Ultimately, it is not the material objects that go a long way. Sometimes the problem with doling out charity is that it breeds dependency, it fosters helplessness, and it ends up dehumanizing the objects of charity. Where is the honor here?

Thomas Babington Macaulay, an English historian, essayist and statesman writes: "The measure of a real man’s character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out."

Excuse me while I disappear into the woodwork. I have some important things to do.