RESPONSE TO RESPONSES: "AN OPEN LETTER TO MY CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN"

RESPONSE TO RESPONSES: “AN OPEN LETTER TO MY CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN”

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 6, 2011

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There has been quite a response to this missive.  Please use it as you desire.

Many wonder what stimulated its creation.  A recent conversation with my granddaughter who is fourteen now, and who reminds me every day of a fourteen-year-old a long time ago is the source.  There is another reason as well which occurred during the writing.

My granddaughter is nearly six-feet tall, a dedicated student, good in all subjects especially science, mathematics, and languages, as well as a passionate volleyball player.  She devours books at a clip that also reminds me of that earlier teenager.  There the comparison ends.  She has an active social life and is a comfortable extrovert.  Our recent conversation centered on “your word.” 

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Anyone who has ever worked with me, or been associated with me in any way knows that when you say you will do something, and don't, I will hound you to death until you do, and if it isn't done I will not trust your word in the future.  A hard taskmaster? 

One time one of my men was talking to another guy at a national meeting, and the guy said to my guy, "Fisher looks like an easy going guy who has no interest in micromanaging."  My guy related to me later to what he said to him.  "Don't be deceived by appearances.  Fisher puts so much psychic pressure on you that you wished he'd micromanage."  I suppose my kids could relate to that as well.

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Before relating the other reason for this missive, I’d like to acknowledge how blessed we old timers are to still be alive when the world is turning inside out and upside down, and righting itself in ways to appear to be totally different, and this is the irony, while still remaining the same despite all the commotion.

 
The Internet, Facebook, the Don Farr Network, et al, is quickly superceding the "expert" in a way that is as threatening to educators and professionals as literacy was to the Roman Catholic Church a thousand years ago.  Power is in knowledge and that power belongs increasingly to the people.

This is revealed everyday in the Don Farr Network of some thousand subscribers, a venue completely free, completely candid, and a conversation of people trying to explain their thoughts and emotions in language, not the easiest thing to do, especially when it comes to their cultural programming of relying on experts, and to trust the judgment of experts more than their own. 

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My intention, as Dr. Donald Farr knows well, is not to change minds but rather to open them to what is going on within and why.  Dr. Don provides this incredible service.  I wonder if people realize how generous this is of him.  I’ve never met him although we are both from a Mississippi River town of some 33,000, about the same age, and with similar credentials. 

I have great respect and admiration for him.  But the origin of the missive was not limited to that.  My missives tend to have a narrow and wider perspective at once.  They are dedicated to explaining what I see, read, experience, and then reflect upon.  This one was no different. 

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For example, I was moved in reading a column by Harold Myerson.  He was reflecting (in this column) on the grim new reality of our society, which he sees as all arrows pointing downward.  This resonated unhappily with me.  

Myerson is editor at large of American Prospect, and a respected commentator on contemporary culture.  My response to his words is like the response I expect from those who read me – to think what relevance it has to their lives and situation

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Editor Myerson looks at the current state of the nation in terms of economics, sociology, and institutional viability, and sees, regrettably, few encouraging signs. 

My take, as you have observed in my referenced missive, is personal as I am what might be called a concerned citizen without protocol.  Stated another way, I am the quintessential amateur. 

A Bantu South African scholar points out that an amateur "is a lover of knowledge, a person who engages in pursuit and study of the hard and soft sciences, religion and philosophy."  This is not how the media are inclined to see the amateur.  Nor is it the way educators; historians, philosophers and experts of all descriptions see the amateur.  The amateur is threatening to the status quo, to business as usual, to the infallibility of institutional authority, to the management elite, and of course to educational institutions that require tuition fees beyond $50,000 per year. 

The irony is that experts have gotten the world into the shape that it is, and it is the Hippies and Yuppies, and drop outs of society that have inaugurated the new age of electronics and the Internet, the climate and culture in which the amateur can thrive.

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What follows is data from Myerson’s piece without subsequent comment.  Editor Myerson writes:

“We are now America, the downwardly mobile.

“The problem isn’t due to the recession.  Would that it were.  The decade just concluded is the first in which Americans, on average, have seen their incomes decline:

(1)     Median household income increased by about $4,000 per decade in the 1980s and 1990s from  $42,429 in 1980 to $46,049 in 1990 to $50,557 in 2000 (in 2007 dollars);

(2)     In 2009 (a recession year) it declined to $49,777.

“Until the housing and financial bubbles burst, we enjoyed the illusion of prosperity through the days of wine and credit.  Now we stand on unfamiliar terrain in which almost all the signs of long-term economic health point downward.

“The share of our civilian population employed has dropped to 58.2 percent – the lowest level since the early ‘80s when far fewer women had entered the work force.

“The social pathologies long associated with the inner-city poor – single-parent households, births out of wedlock, drug and alcohol abuse – now stalk the white working class in rural and postindustrial regions far removed from big cities.  The middle is falling.

“Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, has noted that as wages and employment levels have fallen for Americans who have graduated high school but not college, their level of out-of-wedlock births (44 percent) has approached that of Americans who haven’t completed high school (54 percent).  Americans with college diplomas or more, by contrast, have a rate of 6 percent.

“This grim new reality has yet to inform our debate over how to come back from this mega-recession.  Those who believe our downturn is cyclical argue that job-creating public spending can restore us to prosperity, while those who believe it’s structural believe we should leave things be while American workers acquire new skills and enter different lines of work.  

“But there’s a third way to look at the recession: that it’s institutional, that it’s the consequence of the decisions by leading banks and corporations to stop investing in the job-creating enterprises that were the key to broadly shared prosperity.  

“A study by the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Council Foundation found that the share of the profits of U.S.-based multinationals that came from their foreign affiliates had increased from 17 percent in 1977 and 27 percent in 1994 to 48.6 percent in 2006.

“Making and selling their goods abroad, U.S. multinationals can slash their work forces and reduce their wages at home while retaining their revenue and increasing their profits.  And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

“Our economic woes, then, are not simply cyclical or structural.  They are also – chiefly – institutional, the consequence of U.S. corporate behavior that has plunged us into a downward cycle of underinvestment, underemployment and underconsumption.  Our solutions must be similarly institutional, requiring, for starters, the seating of public and worker representatives on corporate boards.  Short of that, there will be no real prospects for reversing America’s downward mobility.”

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