hit me hard this past week.
One was the President of the Philippines referring to President Obama as the 'son of a whore'.
And the other was the movie 'Sully'.
Any number of things have been said about the Obamas - the daughters have not been spared either. Of course good things have been said over the past 8 years, but the bad has been really bad and without count. This last was the pits, I thought. And yet, through it all, including this last one, President Obama has remained calm and outwardly unperturbed and has retained his dignity. When asked about this latest jibe, he merely said it was not personal and he went on to have a short meeting with President Duterte.
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had 42 years of unblemished record, and yet, when his plane US Airways Flight 1549 landed on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, he was being judged on 208 seconds. The NTSB grilled him. He must have replayed what happened on that fateful flight, countless times. Especially tough questions by the NTSB would surely have raised doubts and questions in his mind. Importantly, and especially, since every one of his passengers and crew was safe, was there really any need for this kind of grilling? To be questioned as one who had options but had not taken them, or as one who had made a wrong judgment call? But he never once blamed the people on the Board. When Jeff Skiles, the first officer, expresses his anguish and understandable anger, all Sully says is that the NTSB is doing their job. It was nothing personal.
It is nothing personal-----Two great men under tremendous stress and pressure have the strength of mind to say about the horrible things said to them or by which they were to be judged that these were not personal. In the first instance, it was possible President Duterte was himself in a very weak position and this was his way of hitting out. In the second, a group of people were trying to find out if what the pilot did was all that could have been done under the circumstances or did he make a wrong decision. I thus came to realize that President Duterte's remarks reflected on him and him alone. And, the case built up against Sully was to be looked at as regular standard procedure.
So, then, what should be taken as being personal - From these two and many more instances that come to my mind, I've come to understand that BEING PERSONAL IS ABOUT HOW WE ARE. How we behave under duress....How we behave when we are abused....How we defend ourselves against unfair and unjust charges....
Whether we can maintain our own personal dignity AT ALL TIMES...