AN OPEN LETTER TO MY CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN

AN OPEN LETTER TO MY CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN  

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 5, 2011

*     *     *

Three of you are now in your fifties, one will soon be joining the ranks, and one is no longer on the sunny side of her thirties.  I mention this because our nation has been living in la la land for nearly seventy years, or since the end of World War Two, and the virtual unreality show is finally crashing into reality with a bang.

Your father, your uncles and aunts, all born in the 1930s, learned to live modestly, practically and quietly, and for the most part with dignity.  They were spirited on by necessity in the hard lessons of survival. 

They have worked hard most commonly in demanding jobs with little upside to leisure, and have done well.  Have you ever wondered why?

*     *     * 

The irony is that children born of these children of the 1930s are better educated than they are, have had more advantages than they ever dreamed of, have shared an optimism promoted by society from corporate commerce to the government, from religious to educational institutions, from recreational to entertainment outlets.  Geared to complacent passivity, we find them now weak willed and weak kneed incapable of facing much less dealing with the reality check before them.  This is not a criticism my children and grandchildren this is an observation.

The problem from the perspective of your father is that you have not prepared your children for it, or have not provided the successful programming necessary for them to face it, and that criticism falls back on parents such as your father.    

*     *     *

People like your father are now in their seventies.  Most of them were formed by the terrible crash on Wall Street in October 1929 even if their parents had no money.  The rich suffer when society goes economically haywire, but the poor who had no voice in the affair are devastated.  Devastation made your father alert to reality and even more conscious when World War Two started in September 1939. 

That ten-year-period (1929 - 1939) was like a branding iron on the soul of your father’s generation.  As young as we were, only little boys and little girls, we saw how society treats people who trust it to be the last word in their survival. 

Even then, before the crash on Wall Street, most people were relatively poor compared to the few that were rich.  The American Dream has always been a myth, but it is a dream that will not die, a dream, however, that your father’s generation, the generation of the 1930s learned never to trust.  The irony is that it did not pass that on to its children and grandchildren, but instead fueled a perverse trust.   

*     *     *

None of you have had an interest in history.  One of you thinks Ponce de Leon preceded Christopher Columbus.  Ponce de Leon came to the American continent in 1513 and Columbus, of course, discovered America in 1492, at least that is how the history books have it.  This may seen like a minor point, but a philosopher once said if you don’t learn from the lessons of history than you will be crushed by history.  We are currently being crushed by history.

*     *     *

Your father wrote in one of his books, a book that failed to interest most people, “That to attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.”  He then added, “The same holds true for ourselves.”

There is no statement that better describes what has happened to the United States of America, and by extension the world that has mimic this country in its unreality since World War Two then this statement. 

Another statement in that book was this, “We are not happy campers.  We have lost our moral compass.”  The result has been the “Age of Anxiety,” which has not yet peaked as our chronic socio-economic disorder over the past sixty-five years.   

*     *     *

If you would allow yourselves to read a little history, I suggest you read about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in office, 1933- 1937.  In a one hundred day period he created a number of acts that were rushed through Congress, or attempted to bypass Congress that put the nation’s poor and unemployed to work in such projects as the WPA, CCC and the NRA. 

Roosevelt also instituted the Social Security System, which was meant as a temporary safety net as the nation experienced the crisis of the Great Depression.  He deserted his class and largely his party to identify with the masses that had done nothing wrong but suffered the most for this economic downturn.  As sometimes happens with good people, he got lucky in a manner of speaking.

The president is given credit for pulling the country out of the Great Depression with these acts, but historians tend to differ, finding World War Two and total mobilization of the national economy to a war effort being primarily responsible for ending the Great Depression.

Be that as it may, the Social Security System became a program that neither Republicans nor Democrats over the years would touch, politically, even during the booming period of the 1950s and 1960s when people of your father’s generation were doing well working for Dupont, or one of the automotive companies in Detroit, or allied industries, or being the first generation from their families to acquire a college education. 

*     *     *

Another irony of the United States is this: while we have arguably the best university system on the face of the earth, more than our share of Nobel Laureates in virtually every category of the prize, we haven’t been a thinking society since our Founding Fathers.  We have been a crisis management society.  Thinkers that attend our universities are for the most part from Europe and Asia, not the American hinterland.  Those Americans that do attend these celebrated universities go in for finance and business and shy away from physics, mathematics and engineering, especially at the graduate school level. 

A crisis management society exists because it never considers much less anticipates unintended consequences.  It is locked into hindsight thinking, unable to get beyond business as usual practices, or to depart from the protocol of established infallible norms.  As a consequence, it reacts to crisis, awards those that react wisely and effectively, never seeming to appreciate the irony of this.

*     *     *

There are two things that your father has experienced in his more than seventy years of living, and they are both assumed to be in inevitable as if laws of nature, which they aren’t. 

The management class is an invention of the twentieth century.  It did not exist before.  Commerce was lean and mean and not always wise, but it had no twelve tier hierarchical structure as it came to have after World War Two. 

We talk a lot about corruption today, but we never speak of the corruption of a system called “management,” or its sustaining rationale, which is the MBA graduate degree. 

The Robber Barons of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, et al, had lean mean machines.  They often hired thugs to enforce their draconian enforcement style.  That said these Robber Barons seem tame today compared to the ruthless excesses of corporate management: inside trading, bloated salary structure and bonus system, not to mention cavalier redundancy exercises, plant relocations and closings, outsourcing, or manufacturing abroad.  This is done without a scintilla of consideration of a trusting workforce of loyal employees.  Workers are punished for their loyalty.  Small wonder there is little trust in the workplace today.

*     *     *

When the shadowy operations of Wall Street, the banking and insurance industries surfaced in 2008, everything came crashing down.  Millions lost their jobs, their homes, and yes, their families, too.  But Wall Street, the banking and insurance industries were bailed out by Congress, and are now back to their old ways while nearly 10 percent of American workers are still unemployed.  It would seem that nonsense still rules.  

Put another way, it is clear our values are in trouble, but equally clear is that our economic system is in trouble because we never seem to learn anything from crises.  Your father is telling you this not to disturb but to alert you to the reality of a society more comfortable with a nervous breakdown than anything approaching normalcy. 

Normalcy requires discipline, sacrifice, balance, self-reliance and self-regard in a place and space where reality can thrive.  Reality denied is the world we all live in now.  It took us a while to get to this juncture.  Humor me while one aspect is considered.

*     *     *

After World War Two, when values and the system seemed in sync, executives and managers paid themselves about 20 - 50 times more than line workers.  The structure of the military-industrial complex during and immediately following that Great War was only about four levels of management. 

In the 1950s and 1960s creeping into the 1970s, management grew.  Managers were paid according to how many people reported to them.  This increasingly had little to do with performance.  Fudge factors such as management by objectives (MBOs) and performance appraisals (PAs) were instituted to measure performance and promote development while doing neither.  It was a charade.  Your father knows this well as he participated in the process for more than forty years. 

After the war, it was a loosey goosey system with broad tolerance because America was now the cat's meow.  Everyone everywhere bought American from automobiles to manufactured goods from food to clothing as factories and farms across the globe were decimated by that war.

The flat organization grew into a monster pyramid of first six, then eight, then ten, then twelve levels of management.  And of course, those at the top of the pyramid had to be like the Oracle of Delphi knowing and seeing and understanding only that which was comprehensible to them. 

Compensation for CEOs grew as the pyramid grew until today it is not uncommon for a CEO to make a thousand times as much as line workers.  This is not called "corruption."  This is called "leadership."

The Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Business Week, et al, fail to mention that this leadership over the past sixty-five years, or during the collective custodial watch of CEOs has found virtually every major American industry tank to foreign competition. 

Nor is much attention given to the fact that Wall Street and the banking industry produce no product only move currency, and then as 2008 indicates not too wisely.  They make the Robber Barons look like Church elders.   

*     *     *

Your father is far removed from this deceptive world but suffers its duplicity nonetheless as everyone else does of modest circumstances.  

Your father, I have reminded you often, is the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, a man who never rose above a member of the Chicago & North Western Railroad's extra board, a man who often was unemployed, and a man who worked on the WPA during the 1930s of the Great Depression.   

Your father was only unemployed when he decided to retire, once in his thirties and again in his fifties when he decided to write about the duplicity, chicanery, gamesmanship and insouciance of management in his corporate experience.   

Your father rode the wave of virtual unreality throughout his career but never forgot his roots.  Nor did most of your father’s generation forget theirs. 

*     *     *

Your grandfather, an honorable man, only lived three days past his fiftieth birthday so you never met him.  He was a wise man with a seventh-grade education.  His legacy to his son, and what I attempt now to pass on to you runs something like this:

(1) The day you forget the roots of your heritage is the day you won’t know who you are and will be open season for everyone else to take advantage of you.

(2) Don't ever offer to do anything you don’t intend to do when you say you will do it.  Your word is your bond.  Your bond is your trust.  If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything and won’t amount to anything real.

(3) Words are cheap.  Integrity isn’t.  Integrity is behavior beyond the words.  Integrity has nothing to do with how much you make, how bright you think you are, or how wealthy you may be.  Integrity has only to do with your behavior following your word to the letter.

(4) When you're talking to someone about someone else, imagine that someone listening over your shoulder.

(5) Take criticism seriously but not praise.  Anyone with the courage to tell you to your face what is wrong with you is an opportunity to learn about yourself.  The criticism might be for spite, but you won’t know that until you examine it, and decide its value.  If it has value, the criticizer is your friend, indeed.  Flattery is cheap and the coin is usually counterfeit.

Your father learned something of this early in life.  He was an athlete of some reputation.  When he was a boy, he went by a clothing store, and the storeowner invited him into his shop.  The storeowner was a big basketball fan.  He had your father try on several sports coats, and thought he looked dashing in an expensive light tan cashmere one.  “It’s yours,” the storeowner said, “good luck against Davenport Friday.”

Only sixteen, not knowing any better, your father wore the coat home proudly, and entered the house in that manner, only to be confronted by his father.  “Where did you get that?”  His father yelled.  Your grandfather was a yeller, especially when he was mad.  He could make wallpaper peel with his swearing. 

“Take that coat back this minute,” he roared.  I did but not before he explained why.  That is what I see missing today.  That is something that I was not good at doing with any of you.  It was not until I was an old man that I realized how important that was.  I’m sorry.

“There’s nothing in this world you get for nothing.  The rich and the poor are alike in that,” he said.  “The rich can afford it but we can’t, ever.  The day you get something for nothing is the day you have made yourself nothing for something.  You can’t get your dignity back once you give it up.” 

I asked my father if I should tell the storeowner all this.  Your grandfather smiled.  “Don’t kid yourself, he knows.”

*     *     *

The other myth that has been perpetrated and then perpetuated has been the idea that since two-thirds of our economy depends on our spending ourselves into oblivion it is our patriotic duty to be spenders and consumers of the extreme, which we have willingly become only to suffer for our excesses when it comes to crunch time such as now.

There is something wrong with an economic system that is so hysterically dependent on spending.  Vance Packard wrote a series of books on hidden persuaders (advertisers) and waste makers (obsessive compulsive consumption) in the 1950s and 1960s.  Christopher Lasch repeated the warning in explaining the culture of narcissism being the therapy of an anxious age in a series of books in the 1970s and 1980s, but alas, to no avail. 

We are not a society that profits from the sincerity of criticism.  We accept pessimistic warnings from scholars and cultural observers as entertainment.  We give them their niche like a dollar given to a panhandler and feel good about ourselves for doing so.  Not to worry.   The sky is not falling.   

*     *     *

Your father’s generation had no trouble saying “no” to themselves when tempted to excess.  They have had trouble saying “no” to their children and grandchildren.  This is unfortunate.

As a result, we have had four generations of educated but emotionally immature and crippled descendents that always want more, and are obligingly given it more often than not. . 

Your father’s generation while being essentially frugal failed to pass frugality on to the next generation and beyond.  Why? 

The simple reason is that your father’s generation didn’t want to see the hurt, the pain, the frustration, or the struggle being repeated that it had endured in the nightmare of the Great Depression followed by the enforced frugality during World War Two, when it was growing up.  Yet, it was that struggle, that deprivation, that inauspicious moment in history that made that generation strong.  This is yet another irony.

*     *     *

The unintended consequences of that lapse in judgment and discipline have resulted in a postmodern world that never seems to find the time or inclination to self-examination.  Instead it escapes into one virtual unreality after another leaving the soul within dormant and unattended.  Small wonder society seems to be running on automatic pilot. 

*     *     *

Natural Law is not concerned with sanity or insanity, plenty or deprivation.  It rules without conscience.  Yet it cannot be violated. 

Before this current century comes to a close, there will be close to double the present world population.  Scientists can fantasize about living on other planets, but it might be better that they find a way for us to live more sanely on our own. 

Half the existing world population has little fresh water, proper sanitation, adequate housing, sufficient food, or the medical facilities necessary to keep body and soul together in sustainable life.  If something is not done soon to meet this shortfall, the nightmares of the future will make the wars of the past seem like sweet dreams in comparison.  Against this possibility, 500 million enjoy FaceBook, delighting in social connection, while 3 billion souls go to bed hungry surrounded by the palpable terror of renegade gangs and the possibly of not living another day. 

*     *     *

My children, I tell you this, not to alarm but to alert you to the reality of the world you have inherited.  Fear has a new appetite.  Fear thrives during moral collapse.  While reality is stored in the recesses of our minds, so deep that we feel no need to believe its presence, innuendos have a field day.  Fear rides innuendo like a tsunami. 

This whole effort has been meant to alert you to that fact.  Many things are going to go away because they have lost their efficacy.  Behavior will be like a drug addict separated from his stash.  Fear pulls us apart; adversity pulls us together.  What will it be?

The Social Security System will disappear most likely when you are about to see it on the horizon of your senior years.  So save now!

Start saying  “no” to your children.  Give them an opportunity to struggle and stand on their own two feet, or crumble.  Your father’s generation knows a lot about crumbling, picking itself off the floor, crawling and finally gathering the strength to stand and face the mirror.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, life is a matter of making choices, as if you haven’t heard that enough, but now it is not simply a cliché.  Time is running out on things as they are. 

The Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt systems.  They will disappear most likely when you are about to see them on the horizon of your senior years, so look not to government for your well being but to living sensible lives free of excesses in every sense, and saving every time you want to impress someone else how rich you are. 

Pass this message on to your children who are so protected from reality that they take virtual unreality to be the real thing.  Unwittingly, they have been trained to be victims of a system that is crumbling before their very eyes. 

*     *     *

Before you write these words off, your father would suggest you give pause.  Every institution of our society has been victim of a retreat from struggle: the family, the church, the workplace, and the government.  Religion isn’t the opium of the people but the virtual unreality show that has no room for reality. 

There would be no “War on Drugs” were not so many Americans addicted to recreational drugs as a retreat from struggle. 

There would be no “War on Values” were more Americans mature enough to make lasting commitments to the values they pretend to support. 

There would be no “War on Paranoia” were American more acquainted and comfortable with people of difference.  The seeds of Viet Nam, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan were planted in the beginning of the last century in the leadership, and even a little earlier by a president who is honored as  “great” and has his profile on Mount Rushmore. 

*     *     *

Your father has lived his comfortable life being the leader of his destiny taking his failures, which have been many, and his successes, which have been equally many in stride as he knew he had no safety net to fall back on, no one else he could trust to show him the way. 

Your father realized early that the twentieth century, his century, was dedicated to contingency planning, which is another way of saying it was made up as it went along with no leadership only leaders, no capacity for introspection only celebrity worship, no sense of what made Americans a privileged group only a sense of entitlement. 

Now circumstances have forced our nation to face reality.  It is now your story in a world that truly is a global village where everyone matters.  There is no room anymore for us against them, but only for collective reality and identity that fosters and works towards the dignity of all men and the preservation of the paradise that is this earth.

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