Dear Dedicated Members for Change,
Brother Rick Boyles, one of the founders of "Dedicated Members for Change" has weighed in on the scourge of anonymous emails and letters sent out to members and Lodges which insult and disparage other Odd Fellows. These communications often contain fabrications and are libelous on their face. But what is, perhaps, worse is that they are anonymous. There is no place in our fraternal order for such cowardly and venomous conduct. This conduct diminishes our efforts to retain and increase membership in our Order. This sort of negativity discourages potential new members from joining and dilutes the fraternal experience for existing members. It is conduct unbecoming an Odd Fellow and it flies in the face of our goals of friendship, love, and truth, and the elevation of mankind.
F - L - T
Dave Rosenberg, PGM
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A Mirage to Hope For
This is in regard to the anonymous letters, entitled “Dedicated Members of Transparency” Since these letters are sent without return addresses, or names of any kind, apparently, the transparency ends at the mailing of these mean-spirited missives.
What is a mirage? It is a vision created by our own personal dream or even at a point of desperation. The movies often show a thirsty or hungry individual grasping towards a mirage of water, or sustenance of some sort. The Odd Fellows themselves are a bit of a mirage. We could easily call friendship, love and truth three aspects of a mirage. Let me explain.
We hope to see in others the vein of friendship, and yet there are some who direct homophobic, racial, or political slurs at each other. Members of long standing have been witnessed tossing innuendoes such as this. How does this extend the hand of friendship? Some members tossing slurs have held titles of leadership and only succeed in demeaning their own legacy.
We imagine the vestige of love, yet we hurl accusations and rumors with no regard to whomever they may hurt. We accuse each other often out of our own desperation for attention not realizing the psychological damage this may cause. We forget that even our own ritual, the prevalent code in our order, says that we will not do this.
We attempt to wield the badge of truth, yet in reality we are only interested in that which punishes those we don’t know or agree with. When someone challenges us, we turn to something even more egregious, hoping to damage someone we are initially supposed to see in friendship.
ll three are often seen in play, being twisted for each other out of some need for self-gratification. Our order suffers from these distortions of our code and moral base. We must return to the original meanings of friendship, love, and truth.
Friendship should be the realization that even though all of us are different, we are all mortal, and by our own code of general laws, believe in a higher power, which surely means that we will eventually have to suffer the shame or embarrassment of our own often insane ramblings.
Love must be the summation of all we are, a grasp of reality before all of us come to the realization that either we learn to love one another and conclude that we have said the last mean word in derision.
And Truth, because truth is all that really exists, not lies, deceit, or slander, and we all stand for each other.
The Odd Fellows must reach the mirage and make the mirage reality, or we will cease to exist like so many other fraternal groups before us. We must accept all people and all hearts as one, and then, too, we can see the mirage of friendship, love, and truth, has become our reality and not just some vision far far away.
If one has a complaint, one should address the correct individual directly, but sending letters blindly does nothing but weaken our order. We are all human. We all make mistakes, but blind accusations directed at hard working members if not addressed to the individual being accused, must be ignored, and the message summarily destroyed. We want our order to survive. Other states have been decimated by in-fighting, and abuse by those who think they are the only ones with all the answers. Our state has many more members than any other state, which proves we have done some things right. Let’s not keep the future as some mirage but rather let’s see if we can make the elusive nature of F., L., & T., a reality.
In F., L., & T., Rick Boyles
