REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007

REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007

PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!

The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."

The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."

The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."

It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.

LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND

I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.

But perhaps something else is missing.

Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.

You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.

This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.

Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.

Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.

Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.

When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.

This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.

Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.

No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.

Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.

Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.

There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?

This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.

We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.

Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.

After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.

The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.

In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.

That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":

"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)

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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/