By Dr. J. Kerkula Foeday
Kerkula Foeday: Reflections & Impact, Issue 31, Monday, September 14, 2026
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Character is not tested when principles are convenient, but when keeping them comes at a cost.
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There is a kind of survival
That climbs from the ashes,
Learns the language of storms,
And refuses to die.
It bends without breaking,
Adapts without surrendering,
And walks through hunger
without selling its name.
But there is another kind.
The survival that changes colors like a chameleon
Whenever opportunity knocks,
That condemns today
What it embraces tomorrow,
And calls the bargain “wisdom.”
Yesterday, the voice was thunder:
Never! Unacceptable! Wrong!
Today, the same voice whispers:
Let us work together.
What changed?
The truth, or the price of standing by it?
Ray Kroc reminds us
That principles are easiest
When keeping them costs nothing.
The real test comes
When the pocket is empty
And the door to compromise is wide open.
Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher and teacher,
Asks the harder question:
If you see what is right
And refuse to do it,
Where is your courage?
So, Liberia,
Let us distinguish survival from surrender.
There is no shame
In changing one’s strategy
To stay alive.
But what becomes of a person
Who changes his conscience
Just to stay relevant?
What becomes of yesterday’s conviction
When today’s opportunity arrives?
What becomes of the soul
When every principle has a negotiable price?
Survival may keep the body breathing;
Only character keeps the person alive.
And if, to survive,
We must become
The very thing we once condemned,
Then tell me,
What exactly survived?
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NOTE
You can also read 📚 this poem at my blog at
https://jkerkulafoeday.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/when-survival-sells-the-soul/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. J. Kerkula Foeday is currently the President of the National Association of Social Workers of Liberia (NASOWL). He is also the current Chairman of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the Amos C. Sawyer College of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Liberia. Kerkula is a passionate educator. He has more than two decades of experience in teaching, spending his earlier years teaching English and Literature at the St. Peter Lutheran High School in Sinkor, Monrovia.