The Cancer of Excellence - Greed

Greed can erode excellent results to the point of destroying all hope of success.  Greed is here defined as the desire for that which has not been earned. 

 If a community is to grow to excellence the members need to work for each others' just rewards.  Not a penny less, not a penny more.   If someone upsets this process by making their own desires more important than the community's well-being then too many members will lose heart and the courage to go out and be excellent.

The cyclone tragedy in Myanmar is a perfect example of this.  Thousands and thousands of the citizens that the government serves are being left to die from hunger and disease because the Junta is too worried about their own political position to allow foreign aid and workers to come in and help.

The obvious tragedy is the unnecessary death, disease, and suffering this will cause.  The more subtle affect will be the disassociation the survivors will feel for their government.  There is sure to be a migration, both physical and spiritual, away from the country.  Why stay and contribute to a land that sees us as so inconsequential that they wouldn't even get us food, shelter, and water when we needed it the most and they had it available.

A government sits at the behest of the governed.  Infuse your citizens with enough dissatisfaction and the threat to your power comes from its most dangerous quarter, within.   But the bottom line is that we are all in this together and how we respond to the tests will decide how excellent we become.  History has taught us a community can tolerate only so much greed in its government before it will stand up and change the greedy leaders.