Humility, or lack thereof

About a week ago, I was writing a blog that I had started with the title "pride". The topic was to be the question of the ability of politicians, diplomats and people in general to let go of pride and actually work together for the betterment of their country. It was sparked by an article from the New York Times that Andris had mentioned in his blog, Abraham Lincoln's getting his most bitter rivals in his government (so as to use their skills for the country), as well as my experience during diplomat courses 14 years ago with 52 diplomats from 27 eastern European and former Soviet block countries. During "Team building" exercises in courses in Strasbourg, we had one session where we were split into teams and told to get the best deal we could (some foreign affairs issue). Story shortened, everyone tried to come out on top - but the exercise was to make us see that win-win was better than win-lose. Unfortunately, in post exercise conversation, we the diplomats felt that although that sounded good in theory, no country we knew of (especially the big ones) would really work that way. How many countries, political parties, or individuals for that matter, can you really see saying "we don't really come out on top, but the other guy gets just as much as we do." For the bigger country, the party in power or the alpha individual, unless the situation is atleast 51% / 49%, unfortunately we felt that they would not go for it; we are all fairly egotistical and would see not the 50/50 as a win.

This was to be my blog - the fact that our pride has increased to block our abilities to work toward a common good.

I wrote the blog text as a word document so that I could play with it, edit it, and try to make it as well written as I see Andris' blog. After I read the text to Andris, I left the doc to return to it another day -so that with even better perspective I could improve the blog. The problem is - I lost the text. Over the last week,every few days I searched for the file in every way I knew how, because I thought what I had writen was fairly good. Ultimately I had to accept that the doc was gone and I could write another one - nothing I had written was worth more searching.

So - who had the pride, or lack of humility.....?