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Stand Up and Cheer
Last Friday, I found the nation’s future leaders and I was awestruck.
I had the good fortune to spend the entire day on a selection panel for Truman Scholars, which provides financial support for graduate studies to promising young individuals who wish to pursue public service.
In the morning, before the interviews began, I told the candidates that I had found my eyes tearing up as I read their applications; in fact, one time this occurred to me on a plane ride across the nation, making me wonder if my seatmates thought I was having some kind of meltdown!
But here is what struck me most about these candidates: their passion – their zeal to engage with public life; their smart desire to make a difference; their ability at such a young age to have already done so much. They exuded a sense of idealism – the kind that makes you want to stand up and cheer.
Yes cheer… in this the age of retreat and skepticism in public life. If anyone questions where our nation’s future leaders will come from, I now know. I saw them last Friday. They are smart and energetic; idealistic but also pragmatic.
I count myself lucky to be able to say that I see two such young leaders each and every day in my office. One, Mike Wood, was himself a Truman Scholar and a native of West Virginia. Patrick Miller, from a small town in Wisconsin, is my research assistant, and graduated from Princeton. You can bet that these guys in their future will run for office or head up a nonprofit or lead an important public-spirited venture – or maybe take over The Harwood Institute.
I always hear people lamenting the lack of leadership in the country. We need to look in the right places to see it. Then we will stand up and cheer. -
Cultural Differences
What is the difference between a culture of opposition and a culture of governance?
This is the question my friend Randa Slim, vice president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, asked during a luncheon at The Harwood Institute a week or so ago. All of her work is done overseas, in such places Tajikistan, Russia, and the Middle East. But her question is relevant here at home.
In the countries where Randa works, people are seeking to cultivate new cultural norms of public engagement. This is no easy feat. People, once wedded to opposition, must now find ways to engage one another in give and take, problem solving, and the building of public life. People must combat their impulses to oppose one another – even physically battle one another. Her work is slow; small victories come hard; social transformation can take a generation or more.
Here in our country, I have come to believe that many of us must more actively cultivate a culture of governance, too. So much of our own political and public landscape has become overwhelmed by groups and efforts committed to opposition. Simply look at the newly-minted 527 organizations during the last presidential election; they mostly cared about the destruction of political figures, seldom putting forth any positive ideas – or ideals.
Much of the political and civic activity on the Internet is geared to instantaneously generating letters to members of Congress or other political bodies – all in the name of opposing one idea or another. The Social Security debate, like previous health care debates, now centers on the opposition to any movement – not the engagement of new ideas.
Many debates in local communities – around growth, race, public schools, and transportation issues – are mired in and stymied by the culture of opposition.
It would be an overstatement to suggest that America’s political and public life is nothing more than a culture of opposition. But I would argue that in public life we have created impulses that now place us squarely on a path of division, acrimony and negativity – a path of opposition. This path squeezes a sense of possibility and hope from politics and public life. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This is why I have become such an ardent proponent of the need to cultivate in public life leaders who hold a different set of public sensibilities and practices; more civic-minded organizations in various sectors of society; and individuals who see themselves in daily life as more than mere consumers, but as citizens too.
No doubt, a culture of opposition can help create an impasse that generates the conditions necessary for change; I have seen this occur in many U.S. communities, and we see it on the news from overseas. At times such opposition is needed to jumpstart progress. But for real and sustainable change to be realized – especially change rooted in common ideals and aspirations – those who stand in opposition must eventually turn to engagement. -
Rather Authentic
The curtain is coming down this week on Dan Rather as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he’d like you to remember him as being authentic. Good luck to him – and many others.
In a recent Ken Auletta article in The New Yorker, Rather said, “The one thing I hope and I believe, is that even my enemies think I’m authentic.”
In America today, too much time is expended on wishing for authenticity; or, better put, working to manufacture authenticity. Leaders and organizations that are purportedly civic-minded engage in endless posturing in order to suggest to people that they “care” about you and understand your reality.
As Frank Rich pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, Rather’s competitor, Brian Williams, the newly-installed anchor at NBC News, has adopted the slogan “Reporting on America’s Story.” It is NBC’s way of signaling that they understand us – they’re on our side. No more of that silly news.
But why can’t people simply let their true words and deeds speak for themselves? Why must they tell us they are being authentic?
What all this hoopla amounts to is a vacuous attempt to connect in a world in which people’s reality is constantly distorted in the pursuit of one’s own narrow agenda. And let’s face it: in so many of these efforts, authenticity is not the goal at all; manipulation is. The bottom line is to make someone believe that you are real; actually being real is beside the point, if not a hopeless endeavor.
More than ten years ago I wrote a report entitled, Meaningful Chaos, which revealed how and why people form relationships with public concerns. One of the key factors involved was something we called “authenticity.” People formed attachment to public concerns when there were three standards of authenticity met (which we have since added to). The standards went far beyond people merely insisting that their own personal prejudices be reaffirmed by what they see, read, or hear.- People want discussions of public concerns to reflect a base sense – which the current level of sensationalism in news coverage and public discourse often undermines.
- People want information sources to reflect an understanding of their experiences and values – and yet such experiences and values often seem dismissed as ‘soft,” “fluffy,” and “unreliable” in today’s rational world.
- People want to be squared with, told the straight story about things – but, such candor is hard to find in public life today.
When I wrote this report, the word “authenticity” was not nearly as widely used in public settings as it is nowadays. But the more we talk about it, the less of it we seem to have.
The problem is that our false intentions become confused with true commitment and follow through. People want authenticity in public life. But it must come from someplace real.