Our Own Personal Responsibility and the Future of the United States
THE OLD PRE-U.S. DAYS: LEADERSHIP BY THE ROTTEN FEW
Leadership, in its essence, is the directing of many by a few. That’s what we mean when we use the term “leader” - it’s someone going ahead to show the way. Western history is replete with examples of nations being led by a nobility, who very often were noble when they began, but who degenerated into corruption within a very few generations. The struggle at the beginning of the United States centered around this concern, and our very Constitution and Bill of Rights are world-renowned examples of care being taken to effectively address a government’s tendency to deteriorate.
Interestingly, we’ve been sucked into thinking we’re a democracy - a form of government that has never worked well - by popular teaching. But even if we were a “democracy”, we haven’t done that well. Witness the emergence of the courts as law-making bodies when the “few” didn’t like the direction the many are taking. The 1963 prayer and 10 commandments decisions - forced on the U.S. population when fewer than 4% actually thought that way - are prime examples. These “decisions” were not decisions, they were bald-faced over-rulings of the will of the many by the desires of a few, who had found they couldn’t accomplish their plans in any other way. They were, in fact, illegal law, and set the precedent for many other “laws” that now have citizens of the country in fear of the judiciary and the knot-headed directions they might choose to make into law when the whim strikes them.
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT OUR DAILY LIVING?
Believe it or not, there is a leadership point to these preliminary comments. When we, as a country, rejected God and His commands to embrace secularism, we had only one place to turn to provide the new morality which our children, and therefore our new leaders, would champion. That turn was to higher education, which had already been working for decades to fill the gap. If you’re in your 50’s or 60’s, you might remember that our university systems vehemently rejected any of the ‘traditional morality’ that had been the bedrock of education and training in the century and a half leading up to the land-mark decision in 1963. But it’s pretty important to understand what we threw out as a part of that rejection, because it underlines many of the issues we find ourselves facing in October of 2008. What did we get rid of? Here’s a short list: q We rejected any of the absolutes that God supposedly required of men, including those of honesty, loyalty to commit-ments, loyalty to others, and even the understanding of what a moral sense involves. q We rejected the basic premise that man, in his own understanding, will always revert to selfishness, and toward pursuing his own ends at the expense of others. q We rejected God Himself. And along with that rejection we taught that honoring Him and His way of living was a crutch foisted upon men by people too uneducated to understand that man can accomp-lish anything to which he puts his thinking and imagination, regardless of what this “God” supposedly requires of men.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE…WHERE ARE WE TODAY?
If we assume that a generation covers 20 years, we are, in 2008, starting into our third generation brought up under the ideals of this system of thinking. And it’s resulted in some interesting outcomes: q Our belief system now changes as the thinking of those in higher education changes, and it’s infiltrated into every aspect of our lives. Have you noticed the changeability of everything from what’s good for our diets to how to raise children? Have you noticed how it changes from decade to decade, often from year to year, depending on what the “professor of the month” has discovered in his or her academic research? Because one of our basic beliefs is to “look out for number one”, we as citizens see no problem in sticking it to big companies, because they have lots of money anyway. We see no problem in breaking speed limits, in cheating on taxes, in being a little less than honest in our dealings with others, because (after all) everyone else is doing it. q And amazingly, we marvel in indignation when our leadership acts in the same fashion, and wonder what possessed them to make such self-seeking decisions that are moving us to the imminent brink of national bankruptcy as our banks and other businesses begin to go belly-up following the tenets of this brave new world we have decided to build.
WHAT ARE OUR ALTERNATIVES?
Interestingly enough, we have faced national calamities before this, calamities that have threatened not only our business world, but each of us personally, with our families and our futures. We’ve really got a couple of alternatives.
ONE, We can continue as we have been for the past 45 years, and seek to solve our problems with more taxes and more involved government oversight by men and women who are as selfish as we are ourselves. Or…
TWO, We could take the approach taken by our ancestors, and bring our businesses, and the whole country, back under the moral system - and the moral God - described in our Declaration, our national Motto, and in our national anthem. Did it work for 150 years? Each of us will have to decide that answer.
But in another 20 years, we will still have to stand back and ask ourselves the same question any people have to ask of the system they choose: “How Do You Like It?”
Tim Connor is co-founder and president of Rodeo! Performance Group based out of Ocala, Florida. Rodeo clients haved developed action-based strategies, reduced interpersonal conflict to zero, enjoyed an ROI of up to 20 times, built highly effective business plans, and developed new habits and attitudes - as well as skills - into their leadership. Rodeo works with all sizes and types of business, with special expertise with medical practices and healthcare related businesses.
