Alignment With Our Principles

The Fire In My Soul

Passion and determination are such vital next steps in moving through frustration and anger into fruitful peace-building action. You may recall (I will help you out here with the related links) that early on this year I wrote several articles about my passion.

• “A Passion For Truth” (March 28, 2011) has some focus on the subject of lying;
• “The Fire In My Soul” (January 29, 2011) took up the subject of the mediocrity of our masses,

More recently I offered my perspectives on accountability and responsibility in:

• “Of The People, By The People And...." August 11, 2011
• "The Games On You, Mr. President" August 13, 2011

Today the perspectives I offered in those four pieces were, again, aroused in me by the handling by various interest groups of our current brouhaha regarding allegations of sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain.

Come on, folks, if we truly want integrity from our representative leaders; transparency, accountability and all that good stuff, seems to me we need to pay attention to the fact that our democratic system does not have much in the way of a serviceable ethics system with definite consequences for non-ethical behavior.

It was one thing that we were just coming of age – and made our discoveries way after the fact about JFK’s womanizing. And, to some extent, I believe, we can even forgive those who were too naïve to believe John Dean’s testimony about Nixon’s role in Watergate. That is until Nixon’s culpability slapped them in the face.

By the time Bill Clinton offered his notorious Map Room con, there was, at least, a consensus, more or less, that our Mr. President had not acted in a very seemly fashion, particularly in the prime of his occupancy in the White House, the scene, no less, of his misbehavior. But that was already more than a decade ago. Time moves on, we grow, we mature. And, at some point we really do need to clarify our values and back up our beliefs with relevant actions, particularly about the role of genuine transparency in public life. .

Not just rely on another media frenzy to shame offenders, or apparent offenders, into just going away. That seems like a cop out to me; a cop out of our voting public not truly expecting transparency. Our proclivity to feed off of scandal takes an inordinate amount of time and energy to clear up. And, the voting public not taking a clearly defined position on things like this is like letting someone else (in this case the media) be called out for naming what one might be too cowardly to speak of oneself.

So what’s it gonna be? Can’t somebody big and bold create a movement that speaks to what we, the not so mediocre masses, believe about even needing to deal with scandals in the first place like the Herman Cain news of today? Instead of there being more room for another round of predictable polarization dramas upon which to feed.

Rather than their being a viewpoint favoring the Republican camp (“Can’t we just please return out attentions to our blazing campaign agendas such as making the other guys look bad about the economy?”), I propose that potential political candidates have expected conduct standards to follow before they start taking up our air time. We sure do spend an inordinate amount of time making noise about all kinds of off the point situations. Yet all that gets accomplished is talk and more talk. Is that all we need and want?

Tell me true, if you know, what are our collective standards of conduct for our politicians to be? If we continue to allow whatever is behind scandals of this nature to come up, hijack our time and attention, and, then, be pushed under the rug, how can we possibly, with personal integrity, continue to complain about the lack thereof in our leaders? We have not taken the time to truly clarify where we stand with our values and standards on transparency. Or, would that demand too much of us when we honestly can’t be counted on to live up to this standard ourselves?

Or, maybe it suffices that the media hype game will be, as with New York’s Anthony Weiner, enough to just make an offender simply go away in shame. On the other hand, gossip and scandal exact such a price, if that is what Mr. Cain is facing. It does seem we could do a bit better in offsetting such problems before they get started. I don’t know how we would accomplish this. However, scandal and its accompanying media frenzy sure  waste valuable human resources.

Putting our money where our mouths are on August 1,. 2011, my beloved New Horizons,' non-profit organization, launched a four year study, the Possible Human, Possible Society Study. A further project, already emerging out of the study is our new Possible Society In Motion Think Tank.

If you live within the one hundred miles of the Washington, D.C. White House and would like to be a participant in our study, please visit New Horizons blog where all kinds of activity related to this project are posted  For details, specificaly, on the study see multiple links on top of our home page. Contact information for the study is at the bottom of the study description page posted.