Oath

Everyone's oath is different, but the theme is the same. Honor.  Honoring ourselves and our fraternal organizations.


All of us stood together with our various pledge classes and said an oath.  An oath to remain faithful and honest to our fraternal organization, so that we may represent our organization to the standard that it deserves.


People say the oath, but do we really know what we're saying?  I'll be the first one to admit that when I was initiated I wasn't immediately paying attention to the words I was saying, and it was not until the winter class got initiated that I truly heard those words I had said just so recently.  But why would I go into an oath I wasn't really paying attention too?  Because I know the organization.  I know the Brotherhood, and I know the values we stand for. That is the point of the Pledge Process; to learn those things so that when we do finally say the oath, it is almost redundant because we had since learned the values and ideals of this organization and have already decided that we share these beliefs and ideals and that we want to represent this organization by holding them up.


So then why do we have problems?  Why do we even need to have conversations like the kind we had in class on Tuesday.  Because there are individuals who lose sight of the Oath, or some that just never really acknowledged it in the first place.  I'm not perfect, my Fraternity is not perfect, but I have faith in the people who joined before me, and I have faith in those who will be asked to join us in the future.  But no one is perfect, people lose sight of why they may have joined; people lose sight of the oath.


So why are none of us just kicked out?  We agreed to respect and honor ourselves and our organizations, and if we're not we don't deserve to be in it, right? wrong.  Because there is more to oath, there is more to our Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods.  We all have to look out for each other, we have to make sure that we're all working together to uphold these values.  No person is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes, but it's harder to make mistakes if you have Brothers or Sisters looking out for you.


Alone we will never be perfect, but together we can be.