Jesse Stuart (1906-1984) has a wonderful essay that calls for an examination of character. In the days ahead, are you going to be a builder or a destroyer? What kind of students are you going to leave the world?

Now weigh yourself. See if you expect to take and not give, or if you expect to give more than you take, to build instead of destroy. Weigh yourself, and if you want to leave the world better because you have lived, you are a constructionist. If you see yourself at the head of a marching army, obliterating people, applying the scorched earth policy to helpless people, obliterating those you dislike for the thrill of it, supervising a slave labor camp or approving of one, then you are a destructionist. The man who drives out of his course to hit a dog or smash a terrapin on the highway or shoots down posters around a game preserve is another. Now weigh yourself carefully Which one are you? Which side will you be on in the crucial years ahead?

Here is another summary of Stuart’s philosophy:

Do you know what my philosophy is? It’s to build and not to destroy. You build and you have to keep building. You can’t turn around and start destroying. I figure there are two kinds of people in the world today: the constructionists and the destructionists. They’re not Democrat or Republican or Catholic or Protestant; they’re just those two categories and that’s all. When the world gets to the place where the destructionists outnumber the constructionists, you’ve the Roman Empire all over again when she vanished. Look at the airplane hijackers. Look at the problems on campus, damaging and destroying. Look at the fellows who blew up those planes in the Middle East. But I think the world is waking up to that destructive stuff. Society has to wake up to it if society wants to live. Everybody is too involved in sweetness light. They don’t want to upset people with the truth. and say sweetness doesn’t always bring light. You have to take a stand and get involved. Even if you get hurt, and oh, listen, they can hurt you out there. 

Dick Perry, Reflections of Jesse Stuart: On a Land of Many Moods (NY: McGraw Hill, 1971).