For the meaning of honor, we need to look to the past

Honor.

Maybe the best five-letter word in our language (or six, if you want to spell it the way our English friends do).

Honour.

Either way, a great word, and one of the ones we seem to lack so much of in modern-day society.

It is both noun and verb, but it's the first category in which I want to look at honor -- and how much we lack it.

Dictionary.com defines the noun "honor" as "honesty, fairness or integrity in one's beliefs or actions." Note that it doesn't include bravery or any sort of great physical prowess. In fact, many of the men who have been awarded our military's highest honor -- the Medal of Honor -- were anything but impressive.

When I was 13 years old, my dad gave me a book of short stories about World War II. I don't remember the name of the book, but two of the stories had been written by his closest friend, Josh Greenfeld. One of the stories was about General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, but the one I have never forgotten was about Rodger Young.

I wonder if there was ever a more unlikely winner of the Medal of Honor. Young was a kid from Ohio who stood just 5-foot-2 and was nearly blind without his eyeglasses and was also nearly deaf. On July 31, 1943, in the Battle of New Georgia in the South Pacific, his 20-man patrol unit was pinned down by a Japanese machine gun nest. Several Americans were killed, and the others needed to crawl to safety. Young made their retreat possible by moving toward the Japanese. He was wounded several times but managed to throw several grenades into the nest before he was shot and killed.

Because of his heroism, his patrol made it back to camp with no further casualties.

Now I don't know if our military people have changed all that much. I know there are still heroes who sacrifice their own lives to save their friends or comrades, but I can't help but wonder how many people we still have in politics, business or the media who fit the traditional definition of honor -- honesty, bravery or integrity in one's beliefs of actions.

Think about these sayings that are now part of our vocabulary:

"Greed is good."

"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

"If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying."

And then think about the hottest new political movement. Libertarianism basically says "leave me alone, I'll make it on my own" and treats that as something admirable.

Does anyone think of Donald Trump as a man of honor? Or a hundred other moguls like him?

It's as if we accomplished what we did in the Second World War and then were rewarded too much for it. Our economy boomed for 20 years because we we were the only major country in the world that wasn't devastated by the war. We bought everything we wanted and still wanted more.

Somewhere along the line, we lost our sense of honor.