Leadership Program of the Rockies

Cardinal virtue emerged at retreat

This year’s LPR Retreat was a milestone in the development of our program.  Speakers of local and national caliber were insightful, prescient and inspiring. 

The flood of new faces at the annual event confirmed a hunger we’ve perceived for the past several months.  More than an appetite for ideas and camaraderie, the new and larger crowd at the LPR retreat was an expression of urgent citizenship and rational assessment of the country’s weakening status. 

Citizen leaders used the retreat to connect, build, plan and visualize the role of freedom-seeking doers in a nation losing its vision.  Partisanship was scarce.

The purer concern was for advancing proven values, ideals and economic themes – supplanting bureaucracy with liberty and weakness with strength.

Beneath the many topics swirling through seminars and sidebar meetings, the unmentioned theme was that of temperance – a virtue rarely visited nowadays, but one more indispensable than ever.

Crisis moments thrive on confusion.  Those whose ambitions entail power and dominion love a good crisis.  They refuse to “let one go to waste.”

Resisting such tyranny is often equally errant especially when predicated upon fear.  Still, resistance is essential.  At such a time, temperance is the moral virtue that brands our best leaders.

The moral virtue of temperance restrains the passions of ambition and pleasure.  It places intellect and reason above impulsiveness setting limits in order to attain that which is honorable.  It is the cardinal virtue that places noble ideas and wholesome values higher than the interests of the struggle itself or, in our case, a political party.

Understood in the proper context of temperance, a good political victory is not a matter of winning an election.  It is instead a function of the goodness proposed, advanced and secured.

Temperance is not compromise. Temperance suggests leaders should not just play to their strengths and inclinations.  Their personal desires and appetites should be restrained when necessary for a more desirable greater good. 

Words like “moderation” and “sobriety” are often associated with the virtue of temperance.  At a time when some see economic crisis as an opportunity for partisan gain, the eye of the LPR leader is always on the sacred prize of liberty.

Our LPR family is enormously deep in political talent and ambition – all of which is needed now as temperance refines our ways.  Such was the cheerful, confident and sober theme of the 2009 LPR annual retreat.