THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."
Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)
I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."
This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.
MARCUS AURELIUS
No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.
Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.
Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.
It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.
Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.
Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.
At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.
From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.
Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.
Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."
"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.
In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.
His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.
As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.
NOTE:
SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.
PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.
Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.
Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.
Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.
All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.
None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.
Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.
True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.
Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.
Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.
Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.
Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.
Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.
With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.
There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.
Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.
Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.
President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."
There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.
Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.
While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.
NOTE:
Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.
Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.
He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.
He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.
And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.
DICK CHENEY
There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.
There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.
It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.
Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.
Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.
Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."
They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.
They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.
Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.
They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.
NOTE:
The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.
The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.
The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.
Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.
Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).
American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.
It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.
It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.
Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.
Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.
Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."
For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.
We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.
TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ
"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- "this & that"
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD - this & that
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
WHY I WROTE "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"
WHY I WROTE “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
Sunday, April 01, 2007
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
NOTE: This is kind of a routine exchange I have with Joseph Brown, lead editorial writer with The Tampa Tribune of a Sunday. Joseph is a Chicago boy who graduated from my alma mater, the University of Iowa. So, we have a connection. Also, I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, a Chicago international firm.
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
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