Moral Story Pdf Free Download

[Paul]

Eightof us, raised in the city, cut loose on hundreds of acres of hills and fields with what amounted to a petting zoo of 300 chickens, 60 pigs, three dozen cows and several dogs and kittens. It was like a planet for kids. You could close your eyes and never stop running.

The farmers, Steven and his wife, Sarah, did not yell like regular parents. They reminded me of Ozzie and Harriet on television with the way they genuinely liked children. And they had a party line telephone in their kitchen, on which you could hear neighbors talking. Sarah was supposed to answer only when there were two long rings and four short ones.

Sarah told my mother this was not much different from breakfasts on any other morning. The exception, she explained, was Sunday, when aunts and uncles followed them home from church, and all the women worked in the kitchen while the men took coffee or lemonade in the living room with the pastor, Father Kenneth, who came alone in his own car after saying Mass. Once everything was set on two tables brought together, the 13 children and adults took their places, no one touching a fork till Father Kenneth said grace and blessed the food.

Everybody in my family thought Don and Will were swell, but their sister Ann was nicest. And pretty. She acted like we were grown, letting me steer the tractor and feed the hogs. And she was sweet on my older brother James, who had wavy black hair and played the guitar like Ricky Nelson. I saw Sarah wink at my Mom one of the nights when James and Ann volunteered to wash the dishes together.

Besides serving at St. Vincent, Father Mitch was a chaplain at Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, where he held office hours a couple of days a week. He welcomed the challenges of his new parish assignment and felt fulfilled and edified by his interaction with parishioners and college students over the next several years. Yet he was having a crisis of conscience. After all those years training for the priesthood, he had second thoughts and had begun dating women.

His boss, the pastor, was Father Kenneth Gansmann, an elderly Franciscan priest who was arthritic, ornery and inhospitable. He was also a pedophile and a sex offender who had been quietly ousted from a parish in Minnesota 10 years earlier and banished to this congregation, but allowed by Church higher-ups to continue working with schoolchildren as if nothing had happened.

I sat down to think about the strange goings-on, when Gansmann quickly came to my office and knelt to go to confession. Mystified, I stupidly let him talk, not realizing he wanted to prevent me from exposing him [by hiding behind] the seal of confession.

Father Mitch ended up extending that sabbatical, after which he left the priesthood altogether, got married and had a successful career as a writer and editor. He did not report what he knew about Gansmann and said he had felt relief and happiness when the friar died in 1974.

In the movies, a psychiatrist hypnotizes a patient who is then able to visualize, minute by minute, a forgotten scene from childhood, retrieving a traumatic memory that had been buried in their subconscious mind. Once the details are exposed, the hypnotist snaps his fingers.

In the 1970s, I was leading what I assumed was a normal existence with a wife, a couple of young children and a career. Had I been administered a polygraph and asked if I ever experienced childhood trauma, I would have answered no. And I would have passed.

It came to me slowly at first: The smell of cigar smoke. The Roman collar. The Franciscan priest I knew as a child: a sexual deviant who operated with impunity. For what seemed like the first time, a reel of vaguely familiar images began unfurling in my mind, how the priest sexually abused me when I was little.

The days and nights following our fishing trip, I thought about little else. How the priest had laid the groundwork for his assailment by befriending my parents and grandparents, my aunts, uncles and cousins, since my mother would invite everyone over like it was Christmas whenever Father Kenneth came to Chicago.

Gansmann reciprocated by inviting my mother and father up to Minnesota, where he was pastor of St. John, and where he arranged it so our family could stay with Steven and Sarah, his parishioners. They had three children but plenty of room in their two-story farmhouse.

Now I could remember wondering about the strangeness of it all, especially since the priest never acknowledged it, as though he were mindlessly petting a dog while reading the paper. I would try to pull away without being mean. But he persisted, advantaged with the wiles of an adult and the aura of the clergy. Lots of things about adults were mysterious to me, and they never seemed to feel a need to explain. Here was an additional layer of mystery, since this particular adult was also a priest.

Repressed memory, for which the medical term is dissociative amnesia, is controversial. Some people who claimed they were victims of child sexual abuse would later recant their accusations, stating that their recollections were falsely imagined and inspired by therapeutic methods.

Following that day of fishing on the lake, I told my wife about the priest. Some weeks later, my siblings. Then my fishing partner and his younger brother, who was also a close friend. But it was pretty much a given that I would never tell my elderly parents. Disclosing information in their twilight years about their lifelong friend manipulating them so he could hurt their child would be crushing, I reasoned. They would see it as a betrayal of their faith negating everything they believed in and lived for. What good would come from forcing them to face such unhappiness in their remaining days?

Instead, I kept it inside, where I could control the damage. And maybe, in the short term, I did. But I had to suck it up for a long time, since my mother lived into her 90s. In the last 20 years of her life, while I was writing for a dozen newspapers, exploring all manner of societal problems as a freelance columnist, I put off using my forum to expose the abuse.

In time, Sarah and Steven came around to acknowledge difficult truths. But such deep wounds leave scars, as they have with thousands of victims and family members worldwide, owing to nearly a century of sexual abuse by Catholic priests abetted by the silence, coverups and obstructions of the hierarchy.

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I write this article from two perspectives. The first is as a consumer who is very irritated by poor customer service I've received lately (it seems to come in waves), and from a corporate perspective. As a provider of customer service, we care very much about upholding our company's second Core Value, "Extraordinary Customer Experience".

Story one takes place in one of my favorite breakfast places. As I looked at the menu I discovered the breakfast option I wanted did not come as a pre-configured option. I wanted the scrambled eggs with bacon and no toast. All I could get "as is" was scrambled eggs and toast. When I asked the waitress if I could just substitute bacon for toast with an upcharge for the delta in cost...she said, "no, we can't do that". For the record, I did spring for the side of bacon and sat there looking longingly at the delightful slices of buttered rye toast staring back at me from the plate for the rest of the meal, but I digress.

Chalk it up to a rigid POS system, inflexible management, poor training, an uncreative mind or all of the above, I was annoyed. This one is a tiny issue to be sure, a seriously, "first-world problem", but it is a microcosm of a problem that all businesses face.

I have loved our Lexus RX330. We bought it for my wife a few years ago. By and large, it's been a great car! Mechanically very dependable, low maintenance and an all-around solid vehicle. It's getting older and Lexus announce a recall for a dashboard defect that caused the vinyl to crack, which ours is.

When we became aware of the recall about a year and a half ago, my wife took it to the dealership to schedule the replacement but they informed her they were severely back ordered and they didn't know when they would have any, but they encouraged us to check back every few months, which we did.

I thought, "what a great opportunity to bring social media to the rescue!" I DM'd @Lexus and told them my story. I said I wanted to give them the opportunity to make this right before I told anyone. After all, I really have like the Lexus and had plans to buy another as the time approached.

Right, wrong or indifferent, my perspective as a consumer was that Lexus had a recall. They didn't provide me with the replacement part for so long that the recall expired and somehow this is MY FAULT? WOW. I told @Lexus, "it sounds like a court of Lexus, by Lexus and for Lexus." Conflict of interest much?!

This ends the rant part of my article. So what do these two little stories have in common? Customers just want to exchange their hard earned money for a product that is simple to buy and simple to enjoy. End of story. Back in the day, Staples had a great ad about "The Easy Button". We should all be striving to provide our customers an "Easy Button" to make doing business with us simple! Burger King had "Have it your way!". What a novel concept. Give the customer what THEY want. Hmmmm.....

We are told to find out how our customers want to communicate, whether old-school phone calls or more tech-savvy modes like text or social media. In the same way, we should try to find out how our customers want to buy!

The moral of the story is, respect your customer enough to make it easy for them to do business with you. Will there be things your customers want that are hard to deliver? Of course! That difficulty should be invisible to them. Make their life better and easier! Truly desire to help them and most of the time, they will reward you with solid loyalty.

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