| Jan. 10th, 2005 @ 08:29 pm ...Clientes... |
|---|
For a Roman, service was a virtue. It was a great honor to serve the people who were lower in social status than you were.
So the idea of "Clientes" was born. It was a social contract, unwritten, between two people of differing social status. Those of higher status gave their services to help those of lower status; in return, those of lower status helped to glorify the higher class.
Example: On an important person's birthday, all of his clientes would gather outside his house before dawn. At dawn they would raise a huge cheer. The VIP would emerge from his house, express surprise and gratitude for the "spontaneous" show of devotion, and would promptly order breakfast to be served for everyone in attendance. Following breakfast, the VIP would pass out gifts to all of his clientes.
Yes, you guessed it: it was seen as better to give gifts on one's birthday than to recieve. The "Patrones" duty was to serve his clientes.
Flash forward to today. One of the major tenets of leadership, in my book, is service to those you lead. For an officer in the military, this means serving my suboordinates. It seems to me that many officers/future officers today see themselves as more important than their men. They give orders, the men obey, this is how the system works. WRONG, I say. An officer's suboordinates should be like his clientes: slightly lower on the totem pole, less experienced, less well-off. It should be the officer's duty, therefore, to work his hardest to elevate them to a level comparable to his own. He should treat them as his own children. In short, officers SERVE, they are not SERVED.
(continued in next post) |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
navyraptor's journal
busy