The Great Reclamation Project

Would you like to have your life back? Your community? How about your country?

It seems as though the United States has entered a death-spiral of self-destruction. The conservative and always mild-mannered New York Times columnist, David Brooks, suggested America is “falling apart at the seams”; that it is “a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.” What we need is a new vision of what life can be and the leadership to match. But we also need to make a commitment to ourselves and each other to change some fundamental behaviors to realize a new destiny through reclaiming what we know is true and good founded in a deep sense of personal responsibility.

When was the last time you sat on the edge of your bed before laying your head on the pillow and said to yourself, “If only all my tomorrows could be like today”? To then rise in the morning with a heart filled with aspirations. To find joy in each face you meet. To be overwhelmed by gratitude. To know that greatness—for yourself, your community, and country—were not just possible, they were probable. To feel like a winner living in the greatest nation in the world. This was once the shared prospect of every American and it can be again.

The Great Reclamation Project is our pathway to a new destiny. It requires a commitment to reclaiming our agency as individuals, strengthening the institutions—both formal and informal— that serve our collective interests, and caring for each other and the environment we inhabit in the same manner we wish to be cared for. It also requires a willful suspension of the long list of grievances, doubts, and animosities we all have collected in the dark days of deceit and peril we have endured over the last several years. To be reclaimed—to affect a new destiny—we must first unshackle ourselves from the anchors of fear and anger and hate. They are killing us. Bearing those burdens is no longer worthy of our attention; it is self-destructive. They must be vanquished to the currents of history.

The work begins at the first hint of dawn—when the sun breaks the horizon tomorrow. We must reclaim our individual lives, our communities, and our country.

Here is how.

Reclaiming Your Life

Step one is taking back our personal agency; to take responsibility again for our decisions and actions that define who we are. To regain our capacity for critical thinking that begins with knowledge gained from credible sources. To be honest with ourselves and truthful with others. Since the dawn of the digital age in the 1990s, we have, willingly and lazily, sacrificed our essential personhood to algorithms controlled by those who wish to exploit us like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We are not algorithms, we are humans. Apps we downloaded to speed our access to news, products, and services to empower our lives have proven to be little more than a means of manipulation that have chipped away at our autonomy one click at a time. In extreme cases of immersion, which I witnessed personally with a former family member, they came to completely displace reality with a toxic and paradoxical mix of self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. Let’s be clear, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (now the Metaverse) could not care less about our welfare. Do not participate in his meta-ambitions. Click delete—forever. Take back your agency as a human being. Discard the fear of missing out (FOMO) in favor of the joy of missing out (JOMO).

As the editor in chief of Tablet, Alana Newhouse, recently argued, Americans are suffering from an ethic of “flatness” that arose through a combination of the progression of capitalist incentives dating to the 1970s, with the application of digital technologies in the 1990s, that have rendered American lives indistinguishable from each other—an epidemic of frictionless sameness. All round pegs and round holes. Our institutions have devolved into “forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators…strangling voice[s]…before they’ve ever had the chance to really sing.” The solution is to embrace, once again, what makes us human. Express your desires, ambitions, and truths regardless of pressures to conform to what the algorithms and apps command of you. Return to the richness of creativity and diversity that once was a hallmark attribute of Americans. As Newhouse concluded, “our lives should not be marked by ‘comps’ and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.”

Next, engage with the world under the assumption that there is more good in each of us as than there is bad. History is loaded with examples of regular folks doing horrible things. But, by and large, humans are wired for goodness. From the beginning of humanity, doing right by each other was the key to survival. Today is no different. The key to unlocking the good is a matter of expectations. Humans love to meet the expectations of those who they wish to emulate—with whom they wish to share an identity. We must flip our lens of expectations from the darkness to the light. Reclaiming ourselves can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A change in moral perspective from bad to good—from desperation to aspiration—is essential to changing our personal and collective trajectory.

In hand with this commitment to the expectation of goodness is the rejection of personally held feelings of fear, anger, and hate. Yes, there are legitimate reasons to feel all of these emotions. I feel them—and fight them—every day. But here is the reality each of us must face. Negative emotions such as these provide those who wish us ill, or who wish to control us, with doors of weakness to exploit. Our fear, anger, and hate are weapons-against-us that produce self-inflicted wounds; that eventually cause us to lose our freedom and any hope of self-determination. This was, and is, the entire strategy of control and manipulation employed by our 45th (and perhaps 47th) president of the United States. It has been used by countless fascists who preceded him. Why provide the ammunition for our own executions?

Reclaiming our lives begins with reasserting our strength of individuality. Taking back our personal agency to create a human garden of beauty and diversity that once left the French philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, both amazed and perplexed as he toured a young America. We must live in the present with an eye on the future while expecting the good in each of us and capturing moments of beauty and success as fodder for gratitude. Know thyself and express thyself while safeguarding beliefs and values such that personal integrity is assured. Flourishing requires character and courage, neither of which emanate from algorithms, nor from apps.

Reclaiming Our Communities

If you have read my essays over the least few years, you know I am a fervent proponent of focusing on the development of what I call stronghold communities. And, specifically and urgently, turning our attention away from the shiny loud object that is our federal government. As David Brooks observed, cited at the head of this essay, our “society is dissolving from the bottom up.” That observation is easy to confirm as each of us have attempted to navigate the conflicts and animosities endemic in the communities we call home. Coupled with the ineptitude of our federal government, which has rendered itself little more than a resource-hoarding sloth, and is populated by those more interested in self-aggrandizement than the welfare of Americans, we face little choice but to fix-our-shit at home and envision a future with stronghold communities as the central actor in curing societal ills and enabling a future denominated in aspirations.

Stronghold communities can come in the form of counties, towns, neighborhoods, or any other organization—open to being defined by those who find themselves in any association to serve a common interest. Just as the reclamation of our individual lives requires rekindling our commitment to personal responsibility, we are similarly required to take responsibility for the communities in which we claim association. The principal focus of stronghold communities is for the production and maintenance of what economists call public goods. Public goods are the things that make our lives work—safely and productively—that we all need individually, but which are only achievable collectively. Schools; utilities; security; transportation, commerce and social infrastructure, are all examples of public goods. In America, we follow schemes of collective capitalism to affect the realization of public goods—a hybrid of socialism and capitalism. Even all types of insurance are schemes of collective capitalism even though they are usually dispensed by private companies. Yes, Mr. Allstate, you are (at least) half socialist!

Stronghold communities must see themselves as significantly more autonomous than they have in the past. They must reimagine themselves as the central actor in securing the welfare of their constituents. The three key skill sets of a stronghold community are: 1) a comprehensive knowledge of the needs and issues of the community; 2) the capacity to persuasively solicit and creatively apply resources to affect the objectives of the community; and, 3) the ability to network by and between other stronghold communities to pursue shared ambitions. Forget the hierarchy that places communities below state and federal institutions. In the future, stronghold communities are the hub of the wheel. We must take sole responsibility for whatever our common interest defines as the public goods of the community. Fortunately, technology is on our side that enables us to both network within the community and to forge alliances between communities to affect the capitalist benefits of division of labor and economies of scale. Traditionally, we have looked to the federal government to perform this networking function, but we must now flip that paradigm on its head.

It starts with fighting—tooth and nail—for the return of our financial resources from the federal government to the state and local level. Keep our tax dollars at home for application to locally controlled public goods. To accomplish this, we must also demand the dramatic reduction in the scope of public goods the federal government is (ostensibly) responsible for. Things like national security, central banking functions, and national transportation infrastructure should remain at the federal level. But things like education, public health, and commerce should be re-delegated to the state and local level. There is no question in my mind that my state, county, and town would have done a better job at protecting our public health during the pandemic than was accomplished by the executive and legislative branches of our federal government, let alone the FDA and the CDC. What a disaster. It is time to scale back the scope of burdens our federal government undertakes and return those obligations and attendant resources to the control of stronghold communities.

Some will argue this pits communities against one another right when we need to come together as a nation. Notwithstanding the fact that our national government cannot effectively produce and distribute many of the public goods we need anyway, competition between communities may produce (as competition often does) better solutions for us all. This scheme harnesses that capitalist ethic of competition that will, no doubt, create differential advantages between communities (and varied attractiveness for people considering relocation), but in the long run will force the unification of communities eager to capture those advantages for themselves through networked coopetition—competing to cooperate. And, unless you haven’t noticed, our well-intentioned national leaders have no chance of unifying the country while the malicious ones have no interest in doing so. As members of our respective stronghold communities, we will all still be Americans, but with a renewed sense of thriving rather than suffering. All, without raising taxes!

Reclaiming Our Country

As argued above, our federal government is irretrievably broken. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t reclaim our country from the bottom, up. The Trumplican Party has completely subsumed what was the GOP. Conservative ideals have been dismissed in favor of a naked power grab designed to protect white Christian nationalists who live in fear of losing their position in the hierarchy of socio-economic-political power. Our nation no longer looks like them and it terrifies them. Ideas are no longer their pathway to power; power expressed as coercion has become an end in itself. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is completely self-absorbed in intra-party bickering and shaming the opposition, all wrapped in a veneer of elite righteousness. As a result, the Biden agenda has collapsed and the American people have been left to struggle to remember why they ever formed a union. Currently, Biden is not just in danger of being a one-term president, he is looking more like a one-year president. This can certainly change, but the prospects look dim. In addition, while the executive and legislative branches seem like they are engaged in a middle school food fight, our Supreme Court in the judicial branch has become a political cudgel that has forgotten such sacred norms as the value and sanctity of precedent. To extend the metaphor of branches, I am reminded of Immanuel Kant’s warning that “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Perhaps our founders didn’t read Kant.

As I read the many recent essays—some scholarly and others sloppy punditry—about the impending collapse of our democracy and the prospect of civil war, I am reminded of an old maxim in my study of international relations which holds that at the time the question has been asked, the eventuality is most likely underway, if not having already occurred. Today, we are indeed no longer a democracy. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people? We have drifted very far from that ideal. The political scientist, Barbara F. Walters, prefers the term “anocracy” which is somewhere between a struggling democracy and authoritarianism. In limbo, but headed in the wrong direction. The prospect of civil war is also well underway. Unless you have been asleep since 2016, we are engaged in a cold civil war that is becoming hotter (just look at the trends of violence) every day. And, the leaders of both major parties are fomenting further enmity at every opportunity they can find. Divide us to oppress us to keep power and money to feed their own illiberal ambitions.

I have heard the argument that other aspects of society—more specifically business, industry and the financial markets—will not allow our democracy to fail, or our cold civil war to become hot. However, the institution most cherished by these entities is capitalism, not democracy. We know, if we accept the highly persuasive research of the French economist, Thomas Piketty, that the endgame of capitalism is the destruction of democracy owing principally to capitalism’s effectiveness in producing concentrations of wealth (then power) among the very few, which is profoundly anti-democratic. Have you ever heard of the Koch brothers? Do you think they prefer democracy to capitalism? Further, unless the violence of civil war disrupts the processes of profit-driven businesses, do you think those executives will care? Their job is to serve shareholders, not the liberal ideals of Thomas Jefferson, or the unification ambitions of Abraham Lincoln.

There is a way to reclaim the spirit of America and the ideals of our founders—to reclaim our country. Like many of the challenges any human organization faces it comes down to charismatic and inspired leadership that is genuinely interested in serving constituent members. In our current circumstances, this means a completely new—even flipped—perspective by new leadership whose aim is to re-establish the prospect of the American Dream, including all the aspirations of every human being within the states and territories of the nation, as well as re-establishing the integrity of traditional American values and human dignity throughout the world. This is damn hard work, but no more difficult than that faced by prior generations.

It starts with candidates who aspire to not just restore a functioning government, but to empower the least powerful among us such that we may all rise to become our best selves. Not just better, best. Yes, we are absolutely stronger together. That has been proven over and over throughout the history of humankind. We need to be lifted up, to believe in ourselves again. New candidates must embrace the intoxicating power of winning; of the natural and contagious appeal of victory, which is among the most alluring attractors known in the constellation of human persuasion. Against all odds, FDR, Reagan, and Barack Obama prevailed over their rivals with one simple proposition: they made Americans feel good again; they made both citizens of the country and people around the world want to identify as Americans. FDR made “happy days are here again” a national mantra during the depths of the Great Depression. Regan claimed it was “morning in America” again. Obama promised the prospect of “hope and change.” Our next president must do much more than “Build Back Better.” They must convince all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, that our traditions of hard work, honesty, and creative innovation will, once again, provide a land of abundance and opportunity unrivaled anywhere in the world.

Last November, I proposed a way out of our mess when I published “MAFGA”: Make Americans Feel Good Again, https://ameritecture.com/mafga/. I argued that “lifting people up has always proven more powerful than putting them down.” That candidates who embraced this concept could save us from the doom of Trumplican-styled authoritarianism. I received feedback ranging from thumbs up to “you couldn’t be more naïve.” Many readers were hung up on a visceral need to bring justice to those (especially January 6th insurrectionists and Trump) who have done America wrong before any pivot to aspirational aims. To be clear, reclaiming America requires justice to be served. I fully endorse bringing the full weight of the law down upon the heads of those guilty of violating our laws, including sedition and treason.  But, I also believe that is the job of our justice system. Our job, as citizens, is correcting our personal behaviors by reclaiming our personal agency, strengthening our communities, and supporting those who are willing to do the hard work of re-establishing the American Dream. We must focus on what is within our control. Absent these efforts, the shaming, prosecution, and punishment of those who we believe have done us wrong may amount to little more than a Pyrrhic victory.

We must flip our focus and intentions to advocating for aspiration, hope, success, and winning, assured and secured in the hand of sincere responsibility for ourselves and each other. If we remain where we are, addled by fear, anger, and hate—divided in the sinister trap of us vs. them—we will seal a fate none of us desires. We will fail ourselves and every generation that succeeds us.

It is time to shift our eyes toward the light of dawn. To rise again in the embrace of hope. To know that our strength and our future are in our hands. It is time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and, before we lay our heads on the pillow of our dreams, know that tomorrow is another opportunity to prevail in the game of life and maybe, just maybe, re-establish that beacon of hope—that city on a hill—conceived by John Winthrop at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

By |2022-02-07T21:46:32+00:00January 17th, 2022|General, Leadership, The New Realities|0 Comments
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Hope’s Betrayal ~ Place Your Bets

In his 1732 “An Essay on Man,” the poet, Alexander Pope, wrote “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” which has been adopted over the years as its shorter version: “Hope springs eternal.” As our own hopes were dashed that 2021 would be a year of rebirth and renewal—as 2021 became a groundhog year to 2020—it is very difficult to breathe hope into our breast yet again. It feels as though hope betrayed us.

We all look to Covid data to gauge when we can lift our gaze from the ground to the sky, but those who study deeper socio-economic and political issues know, Covid (more particularly our response to it) is just the manifestation of much more significant issues now embedded in the American character.

There is a rule that has served me well throughout my life—in all aspects of my life. Does the opportunity, company, organization, person, or other relevant entity respond to intelligence? If it does, proceed with engagement. If it does not, abort. Unfortunately, too many people who call themselves Americans do not—will not—respond to intelligence. The very concept of learning—of taking in new facts about the realities we face and applying this knowledge to guide our decisions and behaviors—has, like masks, become politicized.

Many Americans have chosen ignorance over enlightenment as their stubborn modality to defy progress in the twisted hope of protecting their position in whatever they perceive to be the social, economic, and political hierarchy they prefer. And, of course, there are plenty of political charlatans who promote such politicization to serve their aim of gaining or preserving power. This profound deficiency—the rejection of knowledge—is at the root of our pernicious American character.

Before you read the balance of this post, I feel the need to share my perspective on my commitment to myself as a writer and to you as a reader. Occasionally, I am asked, what is the key to writing well, moreover, to keep writing day after day? The answer is to be selfish; to write for yourself first and always. The writer receives few, if any, accolades or positive feedback, and certainly little or no financial remuneration. If you write for any form of positive feedback, you won’t write for very long.  I write to process the world I see before me; to make sense of it and maybe make a small contribution to the improvement of our collective welfare by sharing what I write.

As for you, the reader, I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate you. Although I do not expect feedback of any kind, you provide what every writer needs: an audience to aim at when making all the little decisions a writer must make. Every writer needs a muse. You are mine. You are the backboard against which I hurl my thoughts to observe the imaginary rebound: hit or miss? You are my necessary and highly useful mirage. At times, however, my truth must trump what I perceive as your preferences to honor my sense of reality; to meet my commitment to see things as they are. This post is one of those times.

I know you want hope in a New Year’s message. I, too, want hope. I want someone to come grab my hand and guide me from the state of languishing that swirls around me toward the sunshine of flourishing that has defined the American condition for decades. And, to be clear, I can point to many things that could break in our favor, but there are harder realities we must address in order for any of those lucky outcomes to produce durable benefits to American society—to change our course in a meaningful manner.

What follows now is a message of realism (combined of prose and verse) rather than puffery. Regardless of what luck may come, character issues continue to beset our path to renewal.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Place Your Bets

As the carousel of threats continues to turn, will we be spared?

In the crush of uncertainty, narcissism has overrun unity as the principal distinguishing factor of American identity. Narcissism’s first victim is love; when combined with the perplexing popularity of ignorance and alternative facts, its endgame may be the destruction of humanity. Can it be stopped? Who will save us?

 

 E Pluribus Unum, rest in peace.

Our myths crumble, jarring and disorienting.

We face tomorrow before we understand what happened today.

Staring into a kaleidoscope of fractal unknowns.

 

Nature and our planet will be fine once we are gone.

 

The planet doesn’t care.

We’ve had our chance to prove our virtue.

Creatures, both great and small have no more tears.

Earth turns toward the next epoch, slowly cleansing.

 

We hold on tight to our sense of entitlement—a comfortable delusion.

 

We believe we are so special.

Then tumble down like pinballs striking out.

Surely, we will be recognized as deserving and great.

While empathy is hung from an oak tree at noon.

 

We beg for grace as we double-down on our sins.

 

The glory of God come forth!

Sacrifice (by others) to assure our redemption.

The light grows longer now to reveal what we have wrought.

The ringing from the belfry clangs discordant.

 

We lean on the warm shoulder of optimism to deceive our desperation.

 

Falsely saved to celebrate ourselves.

We sing our songs of self-exaltation.

Our tribal subscriptions weaken under the weight of hypocrisy.

The flag of humanity bleached of its brilliance.

 

The path forward grows narrow now as we slouch toward Bethlehem.

(We are the beast.)

 

Alas, the bell of reckoning tolls for thee.

Hands reaching to grasp the emptiness.

Striding past crumbling statues and rusting magnitudes.

The road, the road, the road.

 

Deliverance or desolation, is the choice still ours?

 

Who will carry the fire?

Place your bets, or turn in your chips.

The House doesn’t care.

Is it you? Is it me? Is it us?

 

The wheel of a new year churns.

 

Note: With a tip of the hat to John Donne, W.B. Yeats, and Cormac McCarthy who each knew we would get here.
By |2022-01-17T20:08:56+00:00December 30th, 2021|American Identity, General, The New Realities|0 Comments
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Sweet Peace: the Strength of Equanimity

Neither you, nor I, nor anybody knows what the future holds. In the last two years we have all learned this lesson. It seems like the uncertainty of the future, which heretofore lay comfortably beyond the next month or year, came crashing back to the present. Today, let alone tomorrow, has become very difficult to predict. At times, it feels like the flames are lapping at our feet. This immediacy of uncertainty has caused tremendous anxiety that has manifested as depression and pain compromising both our mental and physical health. When we add isolation to the mix, necessary to protect ourselves from Covid-19, we have, in effect, created a pressure cooker with no apparent relief valve.

Yet, by most headline measures Americans are doing well today. The stock market is up, jobs are plentiful, wages are increasing, vaccines are working (if only everyone participated), American’s savings accounts are at historical highs, our military is not involved in any hot wars, and billions of dollars in infrastructure development are being deployed to improve our communities and lives. But, anger, violence, and suicide are at epidemic levels. Despair is at an all-time high. The surgeon general is sounding the alarm about anxiety, depression, and suicide among our children and adolescents. The truth is adults are faring no better. Forget the American Dream, the American experience—our daily interactions that comprise all of those things we do to make our lives work—are, at best, strained and unreliable.

In my now six decades of being an American, I have never seen so many things that just don’t work. The simple things in life can no longer be taken for granted. It is both frustrating and exhausting. Pre-pandemic, if a water main broke there were both the workers and the pipe available to fix it. Christmas shopping did not require an advanced degree in supply chain logistics, not to mention less gift for more money. When a flight attendant accidentally bumped a passenger’s arm while performing their duties they didn’t get punched in the face. People didn’t scream at you at the Post Office for wearing a mask. And, the mail you went to pick up showed up when it was supposed to—undamaged!

The painful paradox of the American experience today is that it is counter to a culture based on striving. As Americans, we believe we cannot only perform the simple things; we can accomplish the unimaginable. We strive to pursue success and happiness on whatever terms we choose. In the midst of all the striving we eventually realize—after both victories and tribulations—that life is more about thriving than striving. At the core of thriving lies sweet peace, which is that strength of equanimity that enables each of us to thwart the effects of people and events that may harm us with a calm sense of resolve. It is also that metaphorical soft pillow we lay our soul upon when we grab a moment to express a sigh of contentment—if only to ourselves—for the blessings of our life.

Sweet peace is, however, by no means a given. Although it is foundational to thriving and resides at the center of it, it is both an essential and fragile asset. For those of us with other issues—who have been dealt an additional blow to their mental or physical health—it can result in catastrophic consequences for the individual and their family. Instability and fragility are now the norm. At times, it seems the only available coping strategies are apathy and resignation: giving up. Meanwhile, there is a large segment of America who are cheering on the destruction of our democratic institutions and reveling in the suffering of their fellow Americans to gain power for themselves, or to just satisfy their sadistic impulses. These are the demons among us.

So, what do we do?

Perhaps we should just keep our heads down and have faith in the old maxim “this too shall pass.” That feels to me, however, like the 2017 hope that the office of the presidency would change the man who held it. How do we keep our chins up and marshal on while our sweet peace shrivels like a raisin in the sun? This is a challenge many Americans wrestle with every day. Demons of despondency seem to lurk in the shadowy vestibules of the house of despair that aim to destroy sweet peace.

Here are a dozen suggestions to preserve our sweet peace; some are mine and others from people smarter than I. To build and maintain what the Stoics called our “inner citadel.” To harness the intensity of today’s pressure cooker to make us stronger.

  1. Hold fast to the memories of better days. Find comfort in the historical fact that we have faced worse and prevailed; that we know how to do things well—to make them work again. My maternal grandfather survived World War I in France and the Spanish flu of 1918-20, then persevered through the Great Depression and World War II to have a family, build many businesses and become a leader in his community. Yes, we can prevail.
  2. Practice self-care and self-love. If you don’t sincerely love yourself—first and always—who will? In an age of isolation, your own love may be the only love available to you. If that fails, it is a slippery slope into despondency. Give yourself permission to be selfish in this manner. You first.
  3. For this moment in time, mental health is more important than physical health. I am fortunate to have the skills and discipline (instilled through competitive athletics) to capably maintain my physical well-being. But, I don’t know diddly-squat about maintaining my mental health. Based on emerging data, few of us do. Making this a new priority has been essential to securing my sweet peace—to preserving my sanity and my life.
  4. As the Stoics (and later Viktor Frankl) argued, we may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to it. And, don’t forget, sometimes the best response is no response, especially when dealing with bullies—the aforementioned demons.
  5. Honor your purpose; your reason for being. Do not give up on who you are and, more importantly, why you are. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how [or what, or where, or who].”
  6. Let those close to you who are struggling know you are there for them. David Brooks wrote in the New York Times recently that a pastor advised him to support those who are suffering with the personal commitment that “I want more for you.” Then, strive to make the “more” happen. Words are nice; deeds are better.
  7. Practice gratitude. As the Dalai Lama suggested, “Let us try to recognize the precious nature of each day.” Express gratitude for what is right with our life; embrace the blessings of the good. Another meditation instructor I follow, Jeff Warren, suggested to take a moment when things go right, or when you see something beautiful to “let the good land.” Savor the good things rather than just letting them pass.
  8. Know that in the long run honesty and virtue are more durable than deceit and iniquity. Selfish cowards and evil-doers tend to meet their demise sooner rather than later. Those who have hurt you will, in the end, hurt themselves such that they can no longer harm you. Karma, baby, karma.
  9. Learn to identify toxic individuals and shun them from your life. It is easy to identify and avoid obvious scoundrels, but the lighter versions—the ones who are all take and no give and who criticize you behind your back—can be obsequious in disguise, but can suck the sweet peace right out of you. They are also those who are often wrong but never uncertain. These are the parasites who find little value in their own lives so they attempt to diminish you to inflate their own fragile egos.
  10. Seek truth and live in concert with Nature. One of Stoicism’s most basic subscriptions is the pursuit of reason and truth, which also means practicing the corollary: rejecting magical thinking and deceit in all of its forms. Do not tolerate bullshit; it is poison and will afflict you both mentally and physically. Live in concert with Nature; it never lies.
  11. Learn, learn, learn. Knowledge is power and lights the path to a better life and a better world. Take care to vet your sources of knowledge. Question the givens. Similarly, avoid or discard those in your life who suffer from close-minded intellectual sclerosis. They are a close cousin of the toxic individuals in #9, above.
  12. Know your own particular deceits and blindspots and work to subdue them. Self-deception is the greatest source of pain and suffering I have endured in my life. Knowing thyself is a prerequisite to steeling thyself. These self-deceptions come in many forms, but the most dangerous one for me has been believing someone else has my best interests at heart. I have learned (the hard way) to trust others to do what they believe is in their best interest (rather than mine) to avoid what can be excruciating anguish.

The most celebrated and followed historical figures in our world are those like Jesus Christ and the Buddha who are believed to have been divinely inspired and bestowed with an inviolable sweet peace. In the face of extraordinary threats (even death) equanimity never left them. They met every circumstance, however grave, with supernatural calm.

Oh, to be like them.

In the modern era, we have witnessed similar strength from people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. Unlike Christ and the Buddha, we know the humanity of these three; they had no special access to the divine or other resources that are not also available to us. It is our challenge, in light of the immediacy of uncertainty and threats we face today, to summon all of our perseverance and love to protect our sweet peace.

I wish sweet peace for each and every one of you during this holiday season.

By |2023-12-01T15:48:13+00:00December 16th, 2021|General, Spiritual, The New Realities|0 Comments
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Hard Truths

I expect things are going to get better in the new year. Especially (if you read my last post about entrepreneurism), for folks who seize the opportunity to start new businesses. However, things may only get better for those who embrace a clear-eyed view of hard truths and who exhibit a toughness of resolve even greater than we were forced to muster during the first two years of the pandemic. In other words, things can get better, but they will not be easier. The years of sleepwalking our way to success provided by the abundance created by prior generations is over.

Our arrival in this world and our departure from it are moments that, for the vast majority of us, are solo events. No one comes with us and no one leaves with us. In the intervening years, we struggle to forge relationships to form families, businesses, organizations, and communities to sate the innate urge to procreate and to enjoy the benefits of belonging. If we are honest with ourselves, of the many effects of the last two years of the pandemic we have realized that the old feel-good trope, “we are all in this together” has proven to be a bell ringing in the wilderness of anxiety, loss, and grief that usually goes unheard. The hard truth is that regardless of how much we extol the virtues of human connection, these last two years have delivered the harsh reality of how frail those connections really are; of how the promise of humanity has been impaled on the rocks of selfish cowardice.

The American myth of “We the people” forming a more perfect union has entered a downward spiral from which it may never recover. Virtuous individualism that binds us as a community has given way to malignant narcissism that is eating the flesh of magnanimity at a voracious rate. Our nation’s political leaders have pursued this carnivorous practice with reckless abandon. There exists a tenet in all world religions that holds we must fall into the abyss before we can summon the courage to support hope in a manner which manifests the promise of a better life. Perhaps that is what is at hand here. However, today we continue to choose hate and shame and violence over the common good. Our better angels have swapped their wings for devil’s horns. If this continues, before too long we will all be, as the image above depicts, dancing alone.

I am fortunate to have built a big life, or at least big enough. That is the socially acceptable version—anchored by humility—of the description of my life; ascribing my success to good fortune. But the truth for me (as surely it is for you), is that I have had both good fortune and bad. In fact, bad fortune is assured for all of us. Suffering is a certainty. Good fortune is created by our persistence to live our life on our own terms. It is born more from willpower than circumstance. Joy is hard won. The honest version of my claim of a “big life” is that I am the reason I built a big life. I tell people I have been lucky to convey a sense of humility, but to a greater extent the truth is I made my luck happen. Acknowledging this truth is critical to surviving and prospering in the new year and the next years. As the Latin proverb, Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat, reminds us: fortune favors the brave.

Our safety, security, and success in the future will only be assured by our individual strength of character, our intelligence, and our willingness to do hard work. The kumbaya “we’re all in this together” trope is just happy horseshit. I recognize that sounds harsh, but hard truths are often hard to take.

Personal thriving—of body, mind, and spirit—begins with accepting the certainty of suffering then taking the risk to summon all your will and resources to endure the consequences with the aim of turning those consequences into benefits that produce fulfillment and joy. No other person or entity will make this happen for you. We can hope for the love and support of others along the way, but we are truly lucky if we receive it. If you have had such support, count your blessings.

In my experience, love and support was promised as a silent quid pro quo to achieve the concealed aim of the faux supporter: to steal away a piece of my winnings. To dine and dash and then claim they were chased from the restaurant by a villainous chef. Claiming victimhood as a path to vindication for bad behavior is as popular today as it is immoral. It is a twisted remnant of the age of abundance we are now departing. It is the essence of selfish cowardice. It is the practice of losers. Betrayal by those who pledged their love and support is the hardest truth I have had to endure in my life. I wish it on no one.

A related hard truth is that once you do achieve success, very few people (if any) will be happy for you. Many, many will claim they are happy and offer you high-fives. Then, they will work to undermine your future success once they fail to take a piece of your success for their own account. These are the silent parasites in our midst and will visit you in many forms from family members to friends to those offering professional support (attorneys, accountants, etc.) to every charitable organization you have never heard of. You will be very popular, and the adulation you receive (with the exception of those who genuinely love you) will be as phony as a Trump tan.

Cynical? Perhaps. But, as one who prides himself on seeing things as they are rather than as I might wish them to be, I cannot allow myself to ignore a mountain of evidence. To be clear, the deceits I have endured in my life are probably no greater than yours, although a big life does also make you a big target. Denying the occurrence of such deceits, or allowing them to be styled as benign events devoid of malicious intent (rather than calling them out for what they are) produces a festering bile that will eat you from the inside, out. This is the poison of injustice. And, denying or ignoring these events allows the offender to offend again, which creates new victims and accelerates societal decline. One must be brave with hard truths if virtue is to be retained, which is the most foundational asset of all.

In 2022 and beyond, we must grant ourselves the arrogance of confidence in our hard truths if we are to survive and prosper. We must be cautious—on the edge of miserly—with whom we convey our trust. I acknowledge the popular argument that vulnerability equates to bravery, but it can also be just foolish. It can leave you violated beyond repair by those who would rather steal your big life than do the hard work of building their own. Today, a preponderance of deceits has caused betrayal to become its own pandemic; more insidious than any viral variant known to humankind.

Pick your music and dance—alone or together. But, be careful where you step. And, always know where every exit is in the dancehall. We have entered an era where our prosperity and well-being will be subject to threats heretofore considered unimaginable in recent history. This trend is well underway. We must meet those challenges with our eyes wide open to the light of hard truths and meet the world with a sense of steely fortitude. Our descent into the abyss may be a necessary prerequisite to the re-birth of hope, but the ladder of hard truths is most certainly our only way out.

By |2023-04-09T13:31:50+00:00December 5th, 2021|General, The New Realities|0 Comments
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The E-Boom of 2022

The bad crazies have dominated America for the last several years; it is time for the good crazies to take the stage.

I expect 2022 will be similar to the entrepreneur-boom (E-Boom) years of 1983 and 1998. Those were years when business—not politics—catapulted the American spirit to new heights. They were years when the most asked question was simply, “Why not?”

George Gilder’s 1984 book, The Spirit of Enterprise captured the energy of the early 80s best as he celebrated the birth of widespread entrepreneurship when he described entrepreneurs as those who “In their own afflicted lives, they discover the hard predicament of all human life, threatened always by the encroachments of jungle and sand. From their knowledge of failure, they forge success. In accepting risk, they achieve security for all. In embracing change, they ensure social and economic stability.” These are the good crazies.

In the late 1990s, it was technology that drove businesses to transform our lives and renew the American spirit. Once again, entrepreneurs provided stewardship of the digitization of everything that drove productivity and economic development to levels unseen in American history. Don Tapscott’s, The Digital Economy (1994) foretold what we have now all experienced: a world in the palm of our hand. First there was fire, then the wheel, then the Gutenberg Press and next the combustion engine and, in the late 90s, a life reduced and (paradoxically) accelerated by 1s and 0s.

A more beautiful insurrection than the bad crazies provided on January 6, 2021is on our doorstep. I am not into numerology, but 2-0-2-2 with three deuces and a one-eyed Jack has to be a good omen. Pick your Jack—the heart or the spade—love or power. Combine it with three deuces and it looks like a good time to go all in. People will be considering decisions that would have never been on their radar a few years ago. No subtlety, no nuance. Big bold moves. A chance to live life on your own terms again, or maybe for the first time? Crises always provide the opportunity to make the world new again. While most sit back licking their wounds or remain imprisoned by their fear and loathing, a few—the entrepreneurs—dive headfirst into the void.

After years of fear and uncertainty, which began with the Trump presidency and ended with COVID-19, we are in transition from a wannabe fascist and a life-threatening pandemic to a rational White House and an endemic annoyance. Home tests, anti-viral drugs and the availability of monoclonal antibodies are game changers. The fundamental shift this allows is removing the threat of the unvaccinated from ending the lives of the vaccinated. Our healthcare system can recover and meet the needs of non-Covid emergencies again. Researchers can take what we’ve learned from the mRNA platform and apply it to other endemic diseases like the common cold and influenzas and, yes, maybe even the eradication of many types of cancer. There are entrepreneurs in the healthcare industry, too.

Our democracy remains under threat and our politicians, who remain trapped in their own shame games and petty grievances are unlikely to save the day by themselves. Addled by anger, which is simply the manifestation of fear, and stuck in a modality of condemnation, which is actually evidence of self-loathing, our well-intentioned politicians may spiral into irrelevance. Especially since most Americans have lost their appetite for listening to their many promises and proclamations. However, an expanding economy driven by non-institutional entrepreneurs has the natural and powerful effect of dispersing power across new centers of influence that are impossible to corral by authoritarianism. Why do you think Xi Jingping is cancelling entrepreneur-cum-tycoons in China like Jack Ma? A broad dispersed economy driven by entrepreneurs is inherently democratic and anti-authoritarian.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of cash in the hands of Americans providing seed capital for startups and funds to support high levels of demand for new products and services. Private and venture capital equity funds are flush. The cost of money will rise but, for now, remains at historic lows. Supply chain issues will be unwinding in the new year. Dispositionally, people are ready to go it alone, away from traditional employment in favor of lifestyle flexibility and abundant generational opportunities to make their own mark on the world. Business startups are already accelerating well above pre-pandemic levels. The IPO market is deal-horny providing a vehicle to realize the economic value created by entrepreneurs and support the long-term capital needs of growth companies.

Finally, breakthrough innovations only occur when entrepreneurship is in full bloom, which is our last hope of dealing with climate change. Our weak-willed politicians and our own selfish intransigence means we will have to rely on transformative innovation in the creation, storage, and distribution of energy. The only other thing that can reverse climate change is catastrophic economic collapse, and nobody wants that. The rebirth of entrepreneurship may prove a just-in-time solution to our greatest existential threat.

As the E-Boom of 2022 approaches, these are my words for my 20- to 40-year-old readers:

  • Avoid complexity. It confuses, confines, and compounds risk.
  • Blow away rules and boundaries.
  • Hitch a ride on a comet—destination unknown.
  • Lose the shackles and throw away the key.
  • Suspend that long search for meaning; let it find you.
  • Those who fail succeed the best.
  • Ask, over and over again, why not?

For my readers 40 to 60 years old:

  • The people at your dinner table should be your principal focus.
  • Balance stability with dynamism; perfect the art of the pivot.
  • Forget about being first, be the best.
  • Segue from accumulation to thoughtful discernment; discard!
  • Be assertive with your hard-won knowledge.
  • Engage with completely new areas of learning.
  • Craft a financial plan to serve you in later life.

For my 60+ readers:

  • Extinguish the fire of anger; avoid the trap of judgement and condemnation.
  • Focus on pace rather than distance; steady now.
  • Seek inspiration in simplicity.
  • Stand ready to lift up those younger than you.
  • Focus on the light of transcendence—rise above the rabble.
  • Allow Nature to define your path.
  • Listen, learn, love; your relevance depends on it.

Sit up tall at the table, folks. Those deuces and that one-eyed Jack are ready to be played.

By |2021-12-05T14:47:30+00:00November 24th, 2021|Leadership, The New Realities|0 Comments
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MAFGA

Do you remember when it felt good to be an American? When the always sunny-side-up Ronald Reagan proclaimed that every day was “Morning in America”? The best day ever in America was always that day, and tomorrow would be even better.

Traditionally, the essence of the American spirit lies in one basic proposition: that the United States of America is the best place in the world to become all you can be—to realize your dreams. If you were born here, you were damn lucky. And, if you weren’t you would do what you could to get here.  The shining city on the hill beckoned all as the escalator to unmatched human fulfillment where each successive generation would reach new heights of achievement. That spirit was indomitable in American life for more than fifty years—from the late 1940s until the early 2000s. Then, we turned against ourselves.

Today, Americans are exhausted. Many feel as though they have been living on the edge of disaster—mentally, physically, and financially—since before the Great Recession, now more than a decade past. Then, the pandemic threw us all in a pressure cooker threatening our very existence. It has taken an extraordinary toll that has proven very stubborn to resolve. The sad fact is that Americans are killing each other at rates not seen since the Civil War, and committing suicide at rates never seen—ever. (Let those facts sit with you for a moment.) Since the early 2000s, we have fallen so dramatically into divided camps of hate-filled animus the prospect of redemption seems impossible to summon.

After fifty years of extraordinary achievements and prosperity, made possible by the sacrifice and toil of six-plus generations of Americans who preceded us, we slipped into the trap of judgment and condemnation, heaping shame on each other at every opportunity. Shame that kindles humiliation, which results in depression, anger, and violence.

The invocation of shame started with the religious right, but today finds its greatest animated vigor on the woke left. “Family values,” espoused by the religious right was always a contrivance to bind true believers together (for the benefit of the church and/or televangelists), and to condemn those who did not join and conform to the money-machine bondage of institutionalized mysticism. Their pro-life movement is perhaps the most enduring shame-based construct of all time. All well-packaged doctrines, but nonetheless hypocritical and knavish.

More recently, the many shame-based movements of the woke left (MeToo, BLM, Defund the Police, Occupy Wall Street) target men, Whites, cops, and the wealthy with a firehose of shame. Do those targets deserve ridicule? Yes, some do. Will it change behavior—solve the problem? Absolutely not. Finally, right when we need everyone on board to solve the many effects of climate change, and to persuade the unvaccinated to get in line for a jab, the principal pathway of persuasion is, you guessed it, shame. We humiliate people and then wonder why they flip us off rather than do what we need them to do, for us and for themselves.

The message is always the same, notwithstanding subtle modifications to fit different targets: you are immoral; you are unworthy; you are deplorable; you are stupid. Like middle school bullies, we put each other down to build ourselves up. In fear of being displaced from our position in American socio-economic hierarchies and/or enduring the effects of a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, or simply satisfying our elitist impulses, we defaulted to putting one foot on our fellow Americans’ necks and a knee on their backs to assure our own status and success. It is little wonder why we live in a toxic cauldron of ire that is destroying our humanity and our country.

This dire assessment aside, there is an enormous opportunity for those in all elements of society—business, political, and social—who are astute enough to provide the foundation of redemption to save us from ourselves and, yes, thrive. Make Americans Feel Good Again (MAFGA) is a simple and powerfully persuasive proposition. Lifting people up has always proven more powerful than putting them down. “Your success makes mine possible” is a tried-and-true leadership axiom. The elegance of this proposition lies in its return on investment inasmuch as the investment—the cost of adopting this approach—is $0.

The use of the term ‘good’ in MAFGA is intentional. Not happy, or great, or special; good. As my high school expository writing teacher often reminded me: “good is a moral term.” Moreover, ‘good’ is the essence of feeling worthy, which is essential to every human being’s sense of self that enables them to succeed in their pursuit of their particular purpose—of their dreams. Evisceration of the goodness in our fellow Americans—what shaming does—is a surefire pathway to societal collapse.

Today, MAFGA can be applied to any aspect of life that requires persuasion. Business, public health, politics, education, law enforcement—wherever you need people to make a preferred decision or adopt better behaviors, making them feel good about themselves for having done so is by orders of magnitude more effective than dropping the anvil of shame upon their heads. Shaming and the humiliation it evokes must stop, now.

Finally, since many of you follow this post for my political observations, to my Democrat readers, it appears the Republicans have figured this out first. While Democrats are busy criticizing each other in Congress, and shaming people who are unsupportive of their policies (from fiscal stimulus packages to climate change to vaccinations), Governor-elect Youngkin in Virginia was making parents of schoolchildren feel good about themselves again and won the statehouse. Even Republican senator Josh Hawley, a Trumpy firebrand, who made some rather visceral remarks about the state of manhood in America last week, is onto something: he was attempting (wittingly or not) to make men feel good again.

In the presidential election of 1980, Mr. Sunshine, Ronald Reagan, defeated the jeremiad-driven Jimmy Carter by granting Americans absolution from their sins. He intoned: you (Americans) are not the problem, government is. You Americans are good. The question for Democrats today: is Biden, Carter? Republicans may not even need history, redistricting, or voter suppression to assure their next wins if they embrace MAFGA-based strategies. The midterm elections of 2022 and presidential election in 2024 may well turn on the simple measurement of who made Americans feel good again. In the emerging post-crisis era, how could making Americans feel good again ever fail? (Wake up Dems, you may not be as ‘woke’ as you think.)

MAFGA, people. MAFGA.

By |2021-12-01T16:24:06+00:00November 17th, 2021|General, Leadership|0 Comments
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America’s Fourth Turning: Rebirth or Collapse?

The decisions we make in the next two years—individually and collectively—will largely set the trajectory of America for the next seventy to eighty years. We are in that magical moment as we emerge from a period of crisis—the fourth in American history—where we re-answer the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” Moreover, how do we organize ourselves for our mutual benefit? The good news is that crises make room to question old rules and conventions as long as we don’t ignore or squander the opportunity.

If history rhymes, 2022 will be like 1790, 1875, and 1945; the dawn of the “objectivism” phase in the cycles of American history which follows the four-phase rhythm on objectivism-liberalism-idealism-crisis that have defined the previous three seventy-five (plus or minus) year cycles. It is a critical time; a proverbial tipping point in our transition to our next future. (For a full illustration of this cyclical thesis see Saving America in the Age of Deceit, chapters 1-3.)

At the end of the first crisis—the American Revolutionary War—our identity emerged as the “Land of the Free.” At the end of the second crisis—the Civil War and Reconstruction—we emerged as the “Land of Opportunity.” At the end of the third crisis—the Great Depression and World War II—we emerged as “Superpower.” At the end of each of these cycles, at a macro-level, the United States became a better and more powerful nation across almost every measure of human welfare. However, a positive outcome following periods of crisis is far from certain. These tipping points can go either way.

Periods of objectivism that follow crises have historically been periods of relative calm denominated in realism, rationalism, and humanism that prevail over the tumult of crisis where all dimensions of our prior identity (most recently “superpower”) are twisted, damaged, or destroyed. In our fourth crisis, which I identified as the Age of Deceit beginning in 2003, it is easy to point to all the damage that has been done. The spirit of America today, which was alive and well after the first three crises (excepting the South after Crisis II), today feels more like a dungeon of depression.

Disunity, anger, isolation, withdrawal, anxiety, and fear are at extraordinary levels right when we need unity, empathy, aspiration, and calm to prevail in our decision making. The American cultural disposition today is both hollow and fragile. We are not heading toward anything as dramatic as an explosion because that requires a significant level of internal (albeit unstable) energy. The Age of Deceit, punctuated by the pandemic, has ravaged our collective spirit. Rather, an implosion seems more likely where our façade of red, white and blue grandeur crumbles like fragile porcelain into a pile of rubble.

At the end of this fourth crisis, an image of collapse is much easier to conjure than one of ascendent rebirth. Rather than emerging into another period of objectivism, we may spiral into a deeper crisis; one that may be denominated by the construct of predation—like a chapter out of Lord of the Flies or, if you prefer a more current reference, Netflix’ Squid Game.

Today, the closest parallel in American history is the South after Crisis II—the Civil War and Reconstruction. Defeated and nearly destroyed, the South fell into a period of depression and regression from which it has never completely recovered. Reflexive Jim Crow laws and the emergence of its stubborn pride of ignorance, or anti-intellectualism, have remained like heavy anvils wrapped vaingloriously around the necks of southern states prohibiting any notion of rebirth or renewal.  Had the South not remained in the union and been integrated into its economic orbit, it would have surely been conquered or subsumed by another nation-state in the late 19th century.

In addition to our current dispositional distress, we have some significant structural issues that contribute mightily to our fragility. Within both the political and social realms, we have allowed structural incentives to promulgate the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. This condition assures the continual festering of political, social, and economic conflict that if left to proceed unabated has, as its natural outcome, violent conflict. The relative distribution of power and means into a state of extreme inequality has a long history of producing devastating conflicts throughout the world. Yes, we could be different, but that notion may be supported by little more than our own hubristic naïveté. (Failed empires have always thought they would be the first exception—until they weren’t.)

Frankly, the only structural dimension that is functioning properly (for now) in our country and world are the financial markets. They have been proven extraordinarily resilient in serving their principal function: the creation of wealth based on the efficient allocation of resources. People rail and whine about their contribution to inequality, but financial markets are not (and have never been) designed to foster equality. They are designed on the principle of equity, which is a proportional concept that holds that wealth (the output) be distributed based on the proportional contribution of capital, labor, and intelligence (the inputs). This is the capitalist concept of equity, which has proven to be the most effective economic construct for the creation of wealth in human history. A different distribution, or redistribution, of the output of wealth based on the now-popular concept of equity proportional to need (rather than contribution) is the socialist concept of equity. To realize this concept of equity, distributive practices must be addressed away from financial markets by political and social policy, which as of today in the United States has proven impossible to affect.

As painful as the above rendering of our current dispositional and structural issues may be to read, believe me when I say, it has been even more painful for me to write. I am an optimist by nature and have always subscribed to the patriotic notion that we, as Americans, can accomplish anything. It resides deeply in my Celtic DNA that, to quote William Ernst Henley’s poem, Invictus, “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” However, regardless of the vast majority of evidence that suggests we may slip into a deeper crisis, there is still a pathway to survive and prosper—to enter a new phase of objectivism.

First, let me assert two realities and one essential trend that I believe we must acknowledge and accept if we are to embrace the axiom of realism—seeing things as they are rather than how we might wish them to be.

  1. Our federal government is irretrievably broken and no longer has the capacity to serve our interests beyond (perhaps) national security.
  2. Our nation is also irretrievably divided such that while we may possess common interests, we are unable to agree on common facts that are a prerequisite to establishing a shared reality upon which to make and execute decisions aimed at serving those interests.
  3. We are, slowly but surely, migrating into like-minded communities that provide a natural basis for future collective action. Our choice of domain—where we wish to live—has shifted dramatically to primarily reflect our political and cultural dispositions.

If we accept these three assertions, we should begin the process of dramatically reducing the role of our federal government and increasing the role of state and local government. Coincidentally, much more in line with the Founders initial concept of the distribution of resources and power between the federal government and the states.

In effect, we must shift our attention and our resources away from the model of the nation-state that has been with the modern world since 1648, and toward the development of stronger states and communities that regard themselves as independent sovereign actors that seek benefit and welfare not through the nation-state, but through what I call state- and locally-directed shared-reality, mutually-beneficial, networked alliances designed to produce the public goods formerly organized and provided by the nation-state. In effect, the United States of America becomes the Affiliated States and Communities of America.

This new design of political, social, and economic organization allows like-minded communities to affect the production of public goods in an expedient and efficient manner—something our national government can no longer accomplish. Enabled by new technologies, there are few barriers to creating networked solutions that transcend prior notions of politically imposed boundaries and artificial prohibitions against free association. For example, if like-minded states, counties, or communities can come together to provide healthcare for their constituents, why should the federal government stand in the way?

This concept of governance accepts the reality of disunity and conflict at the national level by essentially draining the beast of the federal government of its capacity to wreak havoc in our lives—by either action or inaction. Further, it recognizes and subverts the negative impacts of the prospect of the entropic implosion of the United States and subsequent splintering of a failed empire. Finally, it puts us back in control of our destiny. It preserves the spirit of Henley’s final lines in his poem, Invictus: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”

This effort will take many years, extraordinary political will, and highly enlightened and inspired leadership to come to fruition. However, we absolutely do possess the human capital to succeed. America remains a land rich in extraordinary human resources. Alternatively, we can stand by and watch the demise of our American society unfold as the slow-motion disaster that is already underway. We have the power to transition to a period of objectivism and avoid a slide into further crisis if we pursue a new model of governance. The good news is that at this moment in time the choice is still ours. But, by definition, moments don’t last forever.

By |2021-12-01T16:23:46+00:00October 22nd, 2021|American Identity, General|0 Comments
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Letting Go of Quislings & Saving the Future

Major Vidkun Quisling was a bad guy. Norwegian by birth, during World War II as Nazi Germany invaded his homeland, he betrayed his fellow citizens and switched sides to become the leader of a pro-Nazi puppet government to oversee Norway for Hitler until the Nazi regime fell in 1945, after which he was sentenced to death by his countrymen and executed by firing squad in Oslo. Posthumously, he became infamous. “Quisling” (yes, an eponym) has come to mean a traitor or collaborator who assists an occupying force to the detriment of their country. Today in America, we have about 75 million quislings.

The FBI identifies domestic terrorism as the principal threat on their radar to the safety and security of Americans, also known as angry white men with guns. Even while Tucker Carlson, et al wring their hands at the prospect of al-Qaeda rising from the ashes of Afghanistan to attack the United States again, the reality of the moment is that Jihadists are no match for our own domestic terrorists. Yet, this form of American quisling, while grabbing bloody headlines, doesn’t contribute significantly to the 75 million quisling tally.

There is a more insidious and more pervasive threat that no politician (save Biden’s attempts) will directly confront in America today: the roughly one-quarter of Americans who refuse to comply with masking and vaccines. They don’t carry guns (at least not only guns); they carry the SARS CoV-2 virus and play host to future variants. Their breath, while not as intimidating as an assault rifle, can be just as lethal. They are conspiring (wittingly or not) with an even bigger enemy of our health and safety: Covid-19 disease. Aiding and abetting the enemy that is the pandemic, they comprise the vast majority of America’s quislings. They are the much larger threat to America.

However, as maddening as it is to watch American Covid quislings put the rest of us (especially children) at risk, it is time to let them go; to ignore them as if they were invisible. There is an old rule in strategic planning that has served me well, both in my professional and personal life. The shorthand version is “that if it doesn’t respond to intelligence, discard and move on.” “It” in this case can be a person, company, organization, investment opportunity, or any other entity that does not respond in a reasonable and timely fashion to the truth or, more broadly, intelligence. American Covid quislings qualify. They have proven that they do not respond to intelligence. So, set aside your anger and/or empathy (if you have any of that left). Do not continue your efforts to persuade them, nor fight them, nor appease them. It’s time to apply our time, energy and resources to saving the future for the rest of us.

The epidemiologists I follow suggest will be living with Covid-19 and its many variants for years. Our best hope is to wrestle it into a manageable public health risk like seasonal influenza. That said, I have also learned of mRNA concoctions—currently being developed—that could wipe out all coronaviruses within about five years. That includes everything from Covid to the common cold. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I want to bend the ear of my readers over 45 years of age and suggest that we individually and collectively do everything we can to help younger generations achieve their dreams, the same way our parents and grandparents did for us.

My concern today is less for the physical health effects Covid has wrought than it is for the mental health effects that are just now emerging in the psyche of Americans.  Losing the future is completely unacceptable and, currently, that is where we are headed. As one who has spent decades involved with the complexities of strategic planning, Covid is the biggest Joker-in-the-deck I have ever seen. It has proven to be so pervasive and significant in its effects that there is no such thing as long-, or even mid-, term planning.  What we are left with is rising every day and reacting to the flames at our feet. The effects of this condition include a loss of control that manifests, ultimately, as hopelessness. Our psychological well-being, which is the core of the American spirit, is at risk of collapse.

If you belong to the Boomer generation, or are a member of Generation X, the country and the world was handed to you on a silver platter. We are lottery winners who had the good fortune of being born at the right time and place. Most of us have done very well. Those who didn’t probably can’t point their finger at many culprits besides themselves. We benefited mightily from America’s ascension to superpower status after Word War II and, subsequently, the rise of the digital age and all of its benefits and opportunities. Yes, we can gripe about our trophy-kid millennials and selfie-driven Gen Z-ers. But, remember this: we raised them.

For someone my age, who is on a (hopefully) gentle downslope coast to the finish line, I must accept that my impact on the future is limited and, frankly, less relevant than a twenty- or thirty-year-old. My contributions to the world have largely been realized. I can coast in the present moment with my Calm app in hand. It’s the younger people I am concerned about. They deserve our encouragement, support, and consideration. Rather than beat our heads against a wall of anger and ignorance behind which the American Covid quislings fester, we need to be there for the three-quarters who are trying to do everything right. Who, but for Covid, would be blazing a trail of success through their own creativity and hard work. Those still in school or just starting out. Those whose canvas still has plenty of white space upon which to paint. Those who are the promise rather than the past.

It is incumbent upon the rest of us with a bit (or a lot) of gray in our hair to assure we lift up our younger Americans. Sure, we may have been ridiculed by older generations rather than lifted up, but we arrived on the scene under very different circumstances. That silver platter was polished to a high gloss before we arrived. The world as it exists now is our doing, and we have failed to deliver it as ripe with the promise of opportunity as the one our parents and grandparents left us. Rectifying this deficit will be difficult, but not impossible. What we must do with the years we have left is to save the future for those who still have one.

All we need to do is ask the question—often and sincerely—is their anything I can do for you to help you achieve your goals—your dreams? Then, follow through. It doesn’t take much: a hand up, a boost, a shoulder to lean on, a piece of wisdom here or there to get them past the challenges of the day. They want to succeed on their own terms much the same as we did. And, as much as you may like hanging out with your peers, helping younger folks may just lift you up too.

Saving the future is not just for those who will live it; it is for those of us who have already had one.

By |2021-10-22T16:09:53+00:00September 18th, 2021|General|0 Comments
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2001-2021: From Crisis to Unity to Hope to Cruelty

September 11, 2001 was a pristine day across North America. Cool, crisp, and above all, crystal clear. The kind of blue sky no color palette can replicate. Conditions pilots yearn for.

I awoke just before dawn in the “Holidome” Holiday Inn in Salina, Kansas, in one of those 1970s-style hotels where each room faces a cavernous atrium for easy access to everything from shuffleboard to an indoor pool that permeates every molecule of air in the hotel with the stench of chlorine. I had landed the night before at the Salina Municipal Airport in a Bell Helicopter 206L with my co-pilot, Dennis Lang, after attending a family funeral in South Dakota. We were en route back to Dallas, Texas when the world, or at least America’s view of the world and its role in it, changed in the span of a little more than an hour. What I didn’t know at the time was that this date would also come to mark the beginning of the end of the American empire. America’s “unipolar moment” of unmatched power (as international relations scholars have called it) would subsequently be squandered in fits of accelerating hubris, deceit, and within two decades, cruelty.

After a barely edible breakfast served by a surly waitress in the atrium of the inn, Dennis and I took a shuttle to the airport arriving just as American flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. The flight from Boston to Los Angeles cleaved the tower leaving a near-perfect image of the fuselage and its wingspan. Weeks later I learned that of the three people I knew who lost their lives that day, two were on that plane and the other was killed as a result of it turning the floors above its impact into an unsurvivable inferno. Years later I wept, standing before their names carved into the smooth black granite of the 9/11 memorial. Like every non-terrorist who perished that day, they were among the innocents; young men with families and full lives ahead of them. All I suffered was a scarred soul; twenty years later the pain lingers. We managed to receive a clearance for takeoff just as United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. I pulled all the power that helicopter had and headed into those pristine skies with only one thought in mind: get home.

To stay informed in the cockpit, we listened to Peter Jennings on ABC radio as we calculated our course, airspeed, and fuel levels in a long shot attempt to make it to Dallas in one hop. Jennings, who had given up smoking some years before, relapsed under the stress of 9/11 and started smoking again. He died of lung cancer four years later. Shortly after we cleared Salina to the south, the feared but expected order came from Kansas City Center Control: “all aircraft land immediately nearest airport.” As clear as that instruction was, we considered it as any helicopter pilot might, with equal parts of indignation and arrogance. Surely, we thought, that order is only meant for airplanes. We decided to keep going; low, fast, and outside of controlled airspace to see how close we could get to Dallas. As we came abeam Wichita, Kansas, Dennis said, “Uh oh, take a look to the east at ten o’clock.” Two stealth bombers were departing McConnell Air Force Base accompanied by four fighter jets. As they swept into the sky, they looked like two giant stingrays stalked by small dark pilot fish. It was time to talk to the tower in Wichita.

Given its geographic position in the center of the United States, and distance from any other airport of significant size, Wichita was being slammed by requests to land by aircraft from all over the world that were flying across the continent to faraway destinations. The woman in the tower who responded to my call was impressively calm and efficient during what had to be the busiest day in her career and in the history of the airport. She ordered, “November one-alpha-hotel, turn left heading zero-niner-zero and make approach to taxiway following Super-80 on final and in front of the Airbus turning final.” Following a rather acrobatic landing, necessary to avoid the wake turbulence produced by larger aircraft, I scrambled to get a rental car and hotel room while Dennis secured the helicopter. The last planes that landed that morning in Wichita were parked at the ends of the runway. Every square foot of pavement—including tarmacs and taxiways—was covered with aircraft.

Dennis and I checked into the Red Roof Inn adjacent to the airport along with other stunned travelers and flight crews who all had the same two questions on their minds: what in the hell just happened and, most especially, when can we get back out of here? Despite all the uncertainty and fear that were descending like a cloud bank on an otherwise beautiful day, the hotel remained eerily quiet save the drone of CNN emanating from every TV day and night. But, that first night of our unintended sequestration, the paper-thin walls proved no match for the sounds that still haunt my memory: the mournful sobs of flight attendants who realized how brutally those who served their final flights that morning had died—throats slashed with boxcutters by terrorists looking forward to the seventy-two virgins they had been promised in their twisted jihadist version of heaven. It took a couple of days, but Dennis—a cunning gnome of the skies—finagled the first clearance to depart Wichita after the events of September 11th. I am not sure what he said to air traffic control, but I hope most of it was true. We made it as far as Ardmore, Oklahoma, when we were ordered to land again. There was no way air traffic control was going to allow us to penetrate the airspace of Dallas-Fort Worth. To get home, we rented the only vehicle we could find, a van with two seats in front and none in back. It smelled like its prior usage had been for human trafficking, but it got us home.

For those of you who remember the days that followed, the most pervasive emotion was fear. The fear of where will they strike next? As I came to understand after interviewing several Bush administration officials years later, that fear nearly paralyzed the administration; they were determined to circumvent any further attacks on America and Americans throughout the world. To their credit, they largely succeeded.  I remember thinking twice about attending a high school football game at Aubrey High School in North Texas for fear a bomb would be detonated by al-Qaeda below the grandstands. (That’s what a few days locked down in Wichita will do to your mind.) That was the first time self-isolation seemed like the best strategy; something we all have learned to practice during the pandemic.

Fear became a powerful unifier, which seems somewhat quaint today as we have subsequently seen fear used as a powerful divider. But, united we stood. Never before or since have so many American flags been purchased and flown from virtually anywhere one could find to hoist the stars and stripes. Not the modified American flags people display today that represent their political tribe, just the red-white-and blue Old Glory. Recruiting centers for our military were swamped with new applicants who wanted to exact their own measure of revenge on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. With the exception of a few ignorant bigots who attacked mosques in America, most simply rallied around the flag; but, eventually, fear-driven patriotism waned and anger kicked in. Then, hubris. We were, after all, the world’s lone superpower and the Bush-Cheney administration wanted to display that power in the most devastating manner possible. Consideration of the national interest and the attendant discipline to pursue well-defined objectives—the hallmark of George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy—were thrown out the window in favor of reckless revenge promoted mostly by men who had never seen a battlefield in uniform.

Lest we forget, Operation Desert Storm conducted by Bush 41 that removed Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was executed after Hussein had ignored sanctions of the United Nations, and after an international coalition had been formed and the operation had been authorized by Congress. Combat lasted just six weeks and American casualties numbered 148. Saddam Hussein retreated to his palace in Baghdad and Kuwait was freed. Compare that to the thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent over the last twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan only to finally leave—just days ago—with little to nothing to claim as our winnings. Biden is getting the blame and the Bush-Cheney folks are mostly mute. But these days, the truth is buried under a mountain of deceits. We have become extraordinarily skilled at collective self-deception. Perhaps because the truth is just too embarrassing and painful to bear.

As the Bush 43 administration drew to a close in 2008, and the economy was being crushed by many ill-considered deregulations in our financial markets, a tall, skinny, lanky young man from Illinois—who cast himself as the next Lincoln from the same state—raised his hand to become the 44th president of the United States. Barack Hussein Obama, born of a white mother and black father, had the cojones to believe that Americans would put a black man with a funny name in the White House while a white woman named Hillary—of the Clinton Democratic Party dynasty—claimed it was her turn. What on earth could he have been thinking, or smoking? However, one of the things a person of Obama’s rather challenging profile learn is that to succeed in life, you must lead with fists clenched knowing you are going to get knocked down—over and over—but that if you keep getting back up, eventually those with more advantaged backgrounds will move out of the way as they succumb to a weakness of resolve born from their many entitlements.

To be clear, Obama didn’t exactly come from nowhere. He had killed it with his address four years prior at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Delegates and political kingmakers were awestruck at the state senator from Illinois. In his speech, he began by connecting with audiences in the arena and at home by presenting himself as evidence that in America anything is possible—that he would not be speaking as the convention’s keynote speaker if America was not a place where dreams could come true. In so doing, he gave us access to our own dreams and possibilities and, moreover, he personified hope. He called this “the true genius of America—a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles.” After years of fear and anger following 9/11, hope was ascendent once again, purveyed by a curious and unlikely messenger.

In March 2008, in one of his best speeches among many great speeches, Obama addressed the proverbial elephant in American politics and culture: the color of his skin. It was prompted by criticism of his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago who had given many fiery sermons on race relations in America that later caused John McCain’s running mate from Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin, to accuse Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Obama confronted “black anger” and “white resentment” so effectively that it reminded me of when John F. Kennedy confronted criticism of his Catholicism in an address in Houston to protestant ministers in 1960. Once again, Obama’s hope-based rhetoric and intentional linkage of himself to Abraham Lincoln turned a political sinkhole for his campaign into a springboard.

In his remarks titled, “A More Perfect Union,” he reminded us that our Constitution—while failing to directly correct the stain of “this nation’s original sin of slavery” at the time of its adoption—allowed room for “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part … to narrow the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.” This was classic Obama, weaving both realism and idealism together to bring a calm clarity to his message while never slipping into the blame and shame game so prevalent—then and today— among those who intend to advance a progressive agenda. He never allowed his anger to subvert his higher aim: hope. His hope endured, but the change he promised to accompany it—the prospect of being a transformative president—would run into a juggernaut of thinly veiled racism that could not stomach a black man in the White House led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky who made clear he would do everything in his power to assure Obama was “a one-term president.”

At the time of Obama’s election, I was living in Texas where, with the exception a couple of years spent in Washington D.C., I had resided since 1982. In my years there prior to his election, I had rarely witnessed overt racism. I expected it having been warned of southern dispositions prior to moving there from Seattle, but besides the institutional racism that was endemic throughout the United States, I rarely saw anything approaching racial conflict between whites and blacks. That changed once Obama became president. The “N” word, which was never used by anyone in my presence prior to his election, started to creep into otherwise normal conversations, used by folks I had known for years.

As Obama neared the end of his first term, racist bumper stickers started to appear on several cars in the Dallas area and stars and bars flags (aka Confederate flags) were hung in the rear windows of many pickup trucks and semi tractors. In the carpool line at my daughter’s private Episcopal school, a mother in a Cadillac Escalade had a bumper sticker with a black stick figure sodomizing a white stick figure with the phrase “Are we really going to take it this way for four more years?” printed below the illustration. Another popular bumper sticker signaled the melding of evangelicalism with racism in its citation of Psalms 109:8, “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership” as a signal to Christians to rid the country of the scourge of Obama. By the newly antagonized white Christian nationalists this became known as “the Obama prayer.” Change did come, but it wasn’t the kind of change Obama had in mind. It was a shift from hope to cruelty, ushered in most aggressively by a self-proclaimed tycoon from New York City: Donald J. Trump.

Trump had learned his racism at the knee of his father and at the counsel of his father’s attorney, Roy Cohn (former aid to the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin). As real estate developers in New York, their racism was economically based. They equated people of color—any color—to be bad for business. But “the Donald,” as he liked to be called, saw a new path for his racism: to promote himself as a political great white hope. His angle: call to question the authenticity of Obama’s citizenship—so called birtherism. Trump’s incessant attempts to disqualify Obama’s presidency in this manner also gave rise to his favorite technique to discredit others and project deceits throughout his own presidency. The “Well, you know, many people are saying … ” this or that in an attempt to affect uncertainty and cast aspersions. It is a cheap middle-school grade rhetorical trick, but also proved to be very effective as he conveyed 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidency—roughly 80% of everything that left his (public) mouth from 2017-2021.

The Cruelty is the Point, a recent book by Adam Serwer, chronicles the legacy of the Donald J. Trump presidency as it illustrates through this lens of cruelty the innumerable inhumane acts by Trump and his acolytes like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, Greg Abbott, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and so forth. Immigration, healthcare, climate change, education, abortion, human and civil rights—regardless of the issue, the Trump modality always includes some form of cruelty. As Serwer argues, cruelty not only satisfies the male adolescent desire to dominate others, it is a powerful binding agent between like-minded people. As a community, Trump supporters rejoice “in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.” A man whose claims—from his education to his wealth—that are routinely recognized as fraud once the facts are known, finds comfort and validation in his capacity to hurt others. This is the Trump legacy, but it does not have to be ours.

As Americans, our day of reckoning is upon us. It is not coming; it is here.

Osama bin Laden presented us with a crisis on 9/11. Every crisis is a test. How we respond to the crisis is the real test. In the face of the 9/11 attacks we—at first—united due to our collective fear. But then, fear gave way to anger and ultimately hubris. An unchecked power, as the United States was in the early 2000s, is a danger to everyone, but most especially to itself. Empires are seldom defeated by a greater power; they almost always defeat themselves. We were offered a reprieve by the presidency of Barack Obama—a chance to return to the high road of virtue and integrity. To revisit the ideals of our founders who saw America as a beacon of hope formed in spite of our sins and transgressions; the greatest of which was slavery. But we allowed the racism that made that sin possible to be reborn and worse: we allowed its basis in cruelty to metastasize throughout our culture.

Today, the world looks upon America as a pathetic shell of its former greatness. They do so with a mix of scorn and fear as they look at the option of a world dominated by China. No, not Russia, China. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal recently characterized the state of our union as the “Golden Age of Stupidity.” I observe what I have written about elsewhere—what I have called “a pride of ignorance”—spreading from its origins in the South like the delta variant from coast to coast and from border to border. Frankly, it frightens me beyond words. I keep thinking—hoping—that a bright political star will rise again, or a technological innovation will vanquish the threat of climate change, or some other providential stroke of luck will save us.  However, such good fortune rarely visits unworthy people.

If you read these posts regularly, you know that I try to nudge, cajole, and even beg people to summon their better selves. Unfortunately, nearly everywhere I look today, I see cruelty, stupidity, greed, sloth, and systemic failures. These are not the behaviors of a superpower. They are evidence of an empire slipping into a slow-burn descent into irrelevance. Most Americans are in denial, or turning an apathetic blind eye or, like the proverbial frog in the pot of soon-to-be boiling water, think how lovely it is that the water is warming. Too few of us are behaving like we deserve to call ourselves Americans in the manner of those who founded, developed, and were responsible stewards of American power. Our fate may simply be to stand by and watch the pot boil; to let the providence of Nature decide who survives.

By |2021-09-18T14:55:34+00:00September 5th, 2021|American Identity, General|0 Comments
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Amaze me. Please.

I would like you—anyone—to amaze me with your spirit and fortitude. With your sacrifice. With your resilience. With your intelligence. With your dedication. With your honesty. With your passion.

Unfortunately, we are overwhelmed today by stories of grievance; by stories that begin and end with demands based in half-truths or full-lies. Spun and spewed by people for whom life is seen as a buffet of entitlements. People who believe their lot in life will be enhanced by finger-pointing blame at anyone or anything beyond themselves. “Don’t trigger me; I am fragile and it’s your fault!” “Keep those immigrants out; they might take my job!” “Don’t blame me about climate change; I recycle!” “Don’t make me wear a mask, or get a vaccine; my right to ignorance is worth more than your life!” In this age of affluence and abundance, our sense of personal responsibility has largely vanished, and with it our capacity to address urgent problems.

Meritocracy, capitalism, and even democracy, which have served America well as cornerstone institutions, have become whipping posts against which all manner of complaints find a place to whine and wail. To be clear, each are imperfect institutions. Meritocracy has been corrupted by the impulse of plutocrats who have cleverly developed practices and systems to, in effect, turn the meritorious work of their antecedents into inheritable legacies. (See: Ivy League.) The economist Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital, illustrates the terminal effects of the destruction capitalism levies on democracy via its capacity to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few (enabling the aforementioned plutocrats). Finally, we are observing in real time how Trumplicans are using democratic systems to destroy democratic ideals through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and court packing.

However, these institutions served us well for more than two-hundred years. Yes, they have created inequalities and stubborn forms of discrimination, but they also produced the most powerful and bountiful civilization in the history of the world. It is only in the last twenty years that these institutions have fallen into the shadow cast by their dark selves; a darkness perpetrated by those charged with protecting their integrity: politicians, media chieftains, judges, and justices. The lesson: people make institutions what they are, not the other way around. The problem we must address is the quality—the character—of our leaders. These institutions will serve us well again once we become their stewards, rather than parasites eating away their strength and compromising their integrity.

I know it’s hard to find these days, but do you remember courage? It is becoming a quaint virtue right when we need it to rise up to elevate a new spirit of leadership that can purge the cynical charlatans who have turned our cherished institutions into schemes to fill their wallets and sate their frail and vile egos. As I shared with my readers in Saving America in the Age of Deceit, “courage is the spine of character; it is the synaptic command and control system for all other virtues.” I further characterized “transcendent courage” as based in truth, action, selflessness, and the humility of self-acceptance, while providing a fountain of strength to embolden everyone. “Those who act courageously enhance the lives and behaviors of everyone around them” (pages 235-237). This might be called the viral benefit of courage. It tends to spread and replicate in a manner that nurtures communities of virtue. And boy, could we use a renaissance of virtue.

The good news is that we know what to do about the unfortunate by-products of our institutions like inequality, discrimination, and climate change. We have never been stumped in creating solutions—in providing the guidance and guardrails that all institutions require. Our challenge is summoning the will to assert what we know is true. The problem started with embracing lies and fantasies that, when they reached critical mass in the mindspace of Americans, became so disorienting and toxic that today we cannot even agree on a shared reality. Seeing things as they are—the most critical skill in decision making—has become so corrupted by incompetent and selfish leadership that we have no hope of solving any of the problems we face. And, the clock is ticking. If we don’t get our proverbial shit together soon, it may be too late to stem things like civil conflict and environmental catastrophe.

Call me cranky if you wish, but cranky is an awkward yet symbiotic bedfellow of wisdom. I know I won’t have the last word, but please allow me the deep word. I want to look upon my fellow Americans and believe in us the way Abraham Lincoln believed that the Union would prevail; the way Harriet Tubman believed in herself; the way that Nikola Tesla believed in alternating current; the way that every nameless and faceless immigrant that crosses our border believes in their future. Moreover, I want to know that when it is my time to take my leave of this place that America and the world are back in courageous hands.

So please, in whatever chosen role you play in this country of ours, please amaze yourself with your dedication to the truth expressed with a deep sense of personal responsibility, and uphold our institutions in the face of those who would like them destroyed. They have served us well, and they will again, once we renew our commitment to leaders of high character. There is little, if any, time to spare.

By |2021-09-05T14:01:08+00:00August 2nd, 2021|General, Leadership|0 Comments
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