SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT -- ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT – ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 16, 2009

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AN OD PSYCHOLOGIST RESPONSE FROM CARL SANDBURG’S CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS, CHICAGO!

Hello Jim,

Yes, we have problems. But, they are good problems. They come as the result of free speech. The civility cat is out of the bag, never to be caught again.

There is too much gloom and doom among our senior citizens. I'm on the edge of that myself. Lately, I have been gaining optimism for the direction we're moving. I recall my youthful days raging against the machine about wrongs in civil rights, an immoral war waged to promote capitalism, a counterculture run wild with free sex and drugs and the ambiguity of personal immorality with socio-political idealism.

Sure today's youth are wrapped up in their electronic devices, but those devices do not seed polarity, they just facilitate it. Polarity was sown in the Sixties and Seventies. Everyone who took the so called "right path" now realize it didn't get them any further ahead, by their measure, than those who took the "activist path" forsaking real jobs for social change. I assume there is a tinge of bitterness in the anger displayed by those who say the world is falling apart.

When I think of the social angst that existed 40 years ago - dramatic technological advances, black-white conflict, assassinations, a President elected in a landslide then refusing to run for a second term, the Viet Nam War, a President and Vice President resigning in disgrace, college campus unrest - and we whine today because our economy is suffering from gas. The Feds apply a couple of $700 billion bicarbonates we belch and move on. This is a great time. We haven't had a reordering of this magnitude for decades.

We should engage and revel in it, rather than complaining every step of the way.

I hear complaints about the education level of today's youth. Honestly, I am not too impressed with the education level of my peers. I see thousand of seniors march on Washington, Medicare cards in hand, to complain about government involvement in health care. When confronted by an interviewer with a microphone and asked their opinion of "Obamacare" all they could utter were one-word answers. "Ridiculous." "Expensive." And my favorite, "Socialism."

I appreciate that you continually remind us of the past. The lessons and models great leaders have left us should be the touchstone for our decisions as we move ahead. Those wise people wrote much more and gave us insight to the why of their actions.

Just as my example above, sound bites misrepresent the intent and meaning that drives people to act in support or protest. Absent awareness of that deeper force, we are left to interpret things. Our interpretations, then, come from our own personal context and bias. That person's old. That person is Black, Hispanic, Eastern European or Asian. This is what they mean when they say....

We create the lack of civility in our own minds. We react and sustain the bias-fed distrust. Simon and Garfunkel had it right forty years ago.

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening....
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Only, the words of the prophet are no longer written on subway walls and tenement halls but on Twitter.

Stay in the light,

Michael

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS

I am a generation older than you yet your values resonate with me in substantive ways. I mention this not because it is important for your values to be congruent with mine, but to show that the clash of values has been a progressive and consequential one.

You were born after the Great War and are a member of the “Baby Boom” generation, but obviously of parents that believed in fundamental civility, decency and respect for all law abiding Americans. I come from similar parents but a most discerning mother.

My mother was never comfortable with the interment camps during that Great War, which found Japanese Americans, people born in this country, raised and educated in this country but forced to give up their professions, careers, homes, their freedom and privacy to spend the duration of the war in these camps. She shuttered to think if we had been born Japanese American.

Three things were quite apparent to me as I was grown up and only a boy during this Great War:

(1) The patriotism and communal sacrifice from the richest to the poorest in support of the common good during the Great War was everywhere apparent;

(2) The new found role of women in jobs previously the exclusive domain of men in all phases of life, but in particular in industry and manufacturing proved women were not the weaker sex;

(3) The repressed hatred and vilification of the peoples of Japan, Germany and Italy that was seeded by American propaganda during the Great War took on new forms and resembled a toxic virus that once born had no apparent antidote.

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I wrote about these effects IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) from the perspective of an eight to twelve-year-old boy. Now, in my seventies, I see how they have seeded so many false steps in our Republic, and are coming home to roost now, crippling any effort to resolve our problems, which are many.

Since I’ve written widely on these subjects, I will mention them only in capsular comments now.

POINT ONE

Being victorious in World War Two against a world decimated by the war, America had an advantage seldom known by a single nation before – the sky became the limit.

All the selfless sacrifice, all the pulling together for the common good suddenly was put aside. The standard of living of most Americans shot to the sky. Executives of industry who had done so much with so little during the war now built empires of people doing little but making loads of money. There was no restrain.

The 1950s found ordinary sorts from families that had few high school graduates, such as my own, going to college, landing big jobs and having splendid careers without much competition because we were born during the Great Depression when the birthrate was one of the lowest in American history.

CEO Charles Wilson of General Motors in 1953 had the hubris to declare, “As GM goes so goes America!” No one disputed his words.

Meanwhile, Japan, Inc. was about to eat America’s lunch in the 1960s with the American quality technology of W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran and Peter Drucker.

American jobs and markets shrunk in the 1960s and 1970s with NBCTV calling attention to this fact in its 1980 program with the cry, “Japan Can Why Can’t We?” To this day we haven’t come up with the answer.

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POINT TWO

American women didn’t get the vote until the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, but came into their own during the Great War. They still lag in pay and promotion in most jobs, but are the majority of college students in American colleges and universities, and dominate the schools of medicine and education, among others.

There are more women engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists today because women do not shy away from tough disciplines, while more and more men go the MBA route to money and greed.

The breakthrough was World War Two when women proved they could do anything men could do and probably better. The fact that this has taken so long surprises me because I’ve found women far more able than I have found men, far more courageous and principled and able to take the heat when things go awry, and I’m speaking from experience not hypothetically.

What has saddened me is to see women when they rise to CEO status of large corporations putting aside the wide intelligence of their gender and attempt to be as resolute and amoral as men. Such women join the old boys’ club only as girls, and they invariably fail.

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POINT THREE

When I was a boy, I could not understand the signs on the sides of bakery trucks, “The Only Good Jap Is A Dead Jap.”

I’d ask my mother. She would say, her cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling, “I hope you never have to go to war, Jimmy, because war is about killing the enemy, and the only way a man can kill another man who has done him no harm is to dehumanize him.”

My face would screw up in incomprehension. She would see this and add, “We have to make a person a thing because the fear is no one in his right mind could kill a person who has done him no harm.”

The “Red Scare” and the House Un-American Activities Committee followed the war. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the hysteria seeing Communist in the State Department (Alger Hess) and everywhere, even in the US Army, and of course Hollywood with actors, writers and directors. It was a terrible time. I was in college and found there were books I wasn’t supposed to read because they were written by communist sympathizers. I read them anyway.

I’ve never been a joiner or a great one for college bull sessions, but when I couldn’t avoid one I found it remarkable how vehement and hateful some students could become. They found nothing peculiar with the McCarthyism, “Better dead than Red.” I found it scary.

These many years later I sense that fear is a many-sided trigger that a person with the most bizarre credentials can use and be believed as a sage instead of as a fool. I am thinking of the talk show host Rush Limbaugh who now seems to dominate a political ideology.

Brian Williams of NBCTV recently interviewed Former President Jimmy Carter. Carter stated that the current attacks on President Barak Obama are racist in nature, and that this racism is much wider and deeper than the president. The former president sees it as the surfacing of suppressed animosity for African Americans in general and the president in particular. White Americans, he claims, cannot see a black man as qualified for the highest office in the land. I pray he is wrong about most Americans, as President Barak Obama, if given a chance, may prove to be a great president.

That said the banter of one protester in Washington, D.C. proved especially offensive. It read, “Monkey see, monkey spend,” a clear reference to the president and his fiscal policies.

How could anyone conceive much less hold up such a sign is beyond me? It was hurtful to see that sign and it saddened me deeply. I was ashamed as an American for the rest of the world to see such a sign.

I am coming to understand now in my advanced years, much as I would prefer otherwise, how a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler could ever come to power. I must reread Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), a novel about how totalitarianism took hold in the United States, a book I read as a boy.

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