American Idol or American Idle?

American Dream Project on Moral Imagination

This week American Idol gave back. Nearly 30 million American’s watched stories of poverty and disease and heard a plea for help. Yes, there were the stories of unbelievable suffering in Africa, but did you see the incredible poverty and pain related through stories of crime ridden “trailer ghettos” filled with Hurricane Katrina victims, illiterate mothers and obese children in Kentucky, and a single mom working three jobs in Los Angeles only to have her 8-year old weep from the stress of getting the bills paid?

What I’ve learned from talking to thousands of Americans is that what goes through viewers? minds when seeing these stories varies from compassion to blame. It seems most of us think this way: if something bad is happening to a family member, a friend, or us it is a crisis. If it is happening to some one like us, it’s a problem. If it’s happening to someone we view as unlike us, it’s his or her fault. Deal with it.

After Katrina, I was blogging about the sorry state of leadership when lots of angry people replied that most of the victims were lazy, no damn-good whiners who should know how to take care of themselves. This was not the view of a few. Is this what our culture has become?

In our personal quest for more and the competitive energy of our economy, have we lost our moral imagination? We don’t have to.

Read More: American Dream Project on Moral Imagination

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Want to be Happy?…. Change the World

I just read a review of Ghetto Nation, a new book about how the worst of the hip-hop culture is sweeping through teenage America.  It seems that many suburban, middle class teens are embracing the language of gangsta-rap, the obsession of flashy materialism, a disdain of education, and trashy disrespect of women. Underneath the vulgarity is a rapidly growing quest for meaning found in recent social research among American’s youth.  In study after study, today’s high school and college students reveal themselves as America’s most idealistic generation in fifty years.  If you visit our latest home page you’ll see recent video interviews of random students talking about their dreams and concerns.  What you’ll see and hear is astonishing.  They already know how to pursue happiness.  Perhaps it’s time to help them and at the same time help all of us.

Perhaps it’s time to institute a mandatory national service requirement for at least 12 months during everyone’s 18th year.  The range of service could be broad from preschool teaching, to the military, National Park restoration to city beautification, inner city tutoring, or reading to the aged.  The year would be also one of personal growth and coming to self-knowledge.  Every 18-year-old could take talent, interest, and trait assessments, do life-planning, receive training in leadership, time management, goal achievement, relationships, conflict resolution, decision making, financial literacy, and budgeting, as well as the responsibilities of citizenship in our 21st century democracy.  This is a life-changing, society-renewing vision.  We don’t need to create a huge new bureaucracy to do this.  We can link together a vast network of existing for-profit and non-profit institutions to provide training and service opportunities offering real accountability and tangible results. Collecting current delinquent taxes could pay for it.  There are 2.75 million Americans turning 18 every year. There really is no excuse.  Can you imagine what an impact universal service would have on our society in a decade?  What would happen if every young American had a genuine experience and the deep satisfaction of meaningful service?  All we have to do is decide.  It might just increase all of our happiness.

What do you think?  Is it time to put this squarely on the national agenda?  To view the video click here.

2 comments.

Choose to Live the Life You Most Envy

How would you like to live on a beach in Hawaii while you’re young enough to enjoy your children? What if your nicely tanned family could live on one parent’s full time income on a 40 hour a week job? What if this was absolutely true right now, in 2007? It is. It?s what a young couple, friends of mine, are doing today. They have made some very mindful choices. A recent poll reveals that 93% of Americans agree that we are too focused on working and making money and not enough on family? (New American Dream Survey. www.newdream.org). 93% is a big number. It?s almost as if we’re hypnotized by our current work and lifestyles whether or not it brings us satisfaction, let alone joy.

Are we allowing the financial-industrial complex, the Grid, to suck the life out of our souls? This morning I just read that 3 million Americans commute 90 minutes one-way to work. Three hours a day, 66 hours a month, 31 days a year. Millions of us are actually spending a month a year just to get back and forth to work. What are we doing? A brand new Harvard study labeled Americans the “unhappiest country on Earth” because we lead the world in clinical depression, stress related illness, and prescriptions to medicate us from our pain.

Well, the revolution is starting. Last week some Stanford law students started a campaign for graduating students to boycott law firms that don’t offer new associates balanced working conditions including a 50-hour workweek (Lattman, Peter. Wall Street Journal: Eastern edition, April 4, 2007, B2). While there are some of us who’ve become so addicted to never-ending work, cell phones, emails, texting, business travel, non-stop work related thinking and doing that we think it’s normal; it isn’t. Research is clear. Work without sustained breaks makes us stupid (HPinstitute.com). Ruins our judgment, clouds our ethics, and socially isolates us. (The guys at Enron loved to work.) The rat race is poison wrapped in success candy. And the race just gets faster.

It?s all a choice. If you doubt me, let me introduce you to Mark and Patria. Mark’s a 31-year-old father and Patria a 26-year-old mother of 2, Ruby and Atticus. Mark and Patria met and got married during college in Hawaii. Patria went on to get a Master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University. After working in New York and northern California, they fulfilled their dream. They just moved back to Hawaii’s northeast shore. Patria is a social worker at a local hospital. Mark is a stay-at-home dad. Get this. They rented a home on the beach with a slide from their back yard to the sand surrounding a coral fringed lagoon.

They did all this without financial help from parents or permission from the Grid. They did it because they’ve been very clear on what they most valued, and they both agreed to “travel light.” They just choose to do what so many of us wish we could.

Well, you can. Our life is our choice. How’s your commute?

9 comments.

Iraq? I Wreck? I Run?

Please read the whole blog! Iraq has got us all emotionally fried. Every time I write or speak about it, people want to yell at me, tell me I am wrong. I’m okay with that if they’ve taken the time to understand what I am suggesting. Often I find that the person who is yelling at me the loudest for being a dim wit agrees with me the most. They just haven’t taken the time to listen. Besides, my goal is not to be right. It’s to get us all thinking more creatively. To get us all to take the time to listen to each other’s point of view. To consider something different. It?s a “Both + And” world. Instead of trying to be right, we need to “plus” each other to get to a whole new level of solutions.

As of Monday, April 9, 2007, at least 3,281 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,641 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers. (USA Today) And 27,000 more American men and women soldiers have been wounded. Often causing amputations or permanent brain trauma. Military psychologists estimate as many as 100,000 of our soldiers suffer from post traumatic stress.

Human sacrifice is all a part of war. But for what? Iraq is a “liberated” but devastated country. Freedom without safety or security is anarchy and chaos. As one army medic recently said, “We are all patriotic. We believe in duty and doing our jobs. But these powerful inner motivations are easy to exploit. I wonder if we’ve been manipulated by our leaders.” (thepurplecouch.com)

WHAT ARE WE THINKING?

Many historians have observed that an open democracy will not tolerate prolonged wars with ambiguous, unrealistic goals. The horrors of war are too great to bear except for cases of clear, direct threats. When a free society wages war, its outcome must be speedy, decisive, and worthwhile.

We are in a mess, not because we are tough on terror, but because we are not tough enough. It now seems clear that we should have spent our energy fighting the direct source of terrorism, Al-Qaeda. But that target was too shadowy, so we attacked one easier to see. We wanted to make a statement. Even that might have worked, but we lacked the wisdom to build peace from temporary conquest. We needed to secure Iraq’s borders. Establish law and order. Rebuild water systems, the electrical grid, hospitals and schools and provide an international interim government that allowed free democratic institutions to have a chance. We knew all of this. But instead, we conducted this war as if we could liberate Detroit by hanging the mayor, firing the police, destroying the schools, hospitals and businesses and turning it over to gang leaders to fight it out. It wouldn’t work in Detroit, and it’s not working in Baghdad. It’s too late now. We made a mistake and we missed our redemption. Now there is hell to pay.

The vast majority of people in the world want peace, safety, education, fresh water, electricity, and a chance to give their children a better life. Some of us don’t believe that. Some of us think most Muslims want Jihad. That’s exactly what terrorists want us to think. They want to scare us into thinking every Arab or every follower of Islam is a violent enemy. As long as we think that, the terrorists exaggerate their power and polarize the world. It’s an old, old trick, and we have fallen for it.

What if we had tried something different? What if we had used all the powerful human energy of the Twin Towers tragedy to respond in wisdom instead of fear and revenge? This isn’t sissy talk. Suppose we had marshaled all of our military resources on capturing or killing the terrorists that mattered. At the same time, what if we had committed our hundreds of billions of dollars toward expediting the technology for renewable energy so that we would no longer need Middle Eastern oil? What if we spent another hundred billion on helping create secular free schools in the Middle East and actually modeled the moral high ground we claim? We will only win this war if we win the war of ideals.

Of course there will always be terrorists. We had a chance to isolate the world’s most radical terrorists in mountain caves. We had the whole world on our side. Instead we let the lunatics of the Middle East bait us into a war they only have to survive to win. They cannot beat us, to be sure, but they can outlast us. And that’s all they need to do. They blindsided us and taunted us, and we responded exactly the way they wanted us to. Like suckers on a playground.

Fighting a bad idea only gives it more strength, more resistance. Pouring energy into better ideas starves the bad idea out and causes it to wither and die.

You may think I am naive. Perhaps. But what is most naive is to think what we are doing is working. We need to reduce the level of terrorism to the fewest possible crazies and work on positively changing the minds of the rest. Most of all - and this is a giant Duh - we need to minimize our economic dependence on their resources. This will not be achieved with small ideas. It requires entirely new thinking. Decisively eliminating real threats and pouring new solutions into the root causes.

To find out more about the war, visit Iraq War pros and cons.

Where do you stand? What are your ideas to solve this problem?

Let us know. We want to hear your voice.

8 comments.

Make Your Difference Everyday

After spending the past three years giving speeches throughout our country, I have a powerful conviction that, deep down, we know we have the solutions to our own confusion.  Answers seem to be on the tips of our tongues, like a memory that has just slipped our mind.  The answers we seek are already embedded in our spiritual wiring; we are merely fumbling in the dark for the switch to turn the lights on.

Amidst the darkness of the evening news, the never-ending war on terror, the decline of the middle class, the tidal wave of national debt, and the corruption of our institutions, there is another voice calling out.  A voice calling for a rebirth of vision.  A vision in which the greatest good for each and all is once again the ideal.  It’s a new model of governing without the corruption of special interest and financial favors.  A new model of sustainable enterprise that aims for the Greatest Total Value for all.  A new model of free education focused on lifelong learning without the crippling costs of bureaucracy.  A new model of personal action based on understanding our own unique design and our most noble human desires.

This is all more than a dream.  It is The Dream.

The genuine American Dream.  Our research of over 12,000 Americans reveals that the exhausted refugees of Boomer World and our meaning-hungry children find themselves longing for the same five things.

We want enduring relationships and families that work. 

Love, loyalty and intimacy are our greatest needs because that’s what has been missing.  It’s time for a re-commitment to commitment.  For us and our children.

We want a lifestyle we both value and enjoy.

We want to live in a safe, attractive place we can afford.  We want to do things that feed our soul and engage our emotions.  We want community, meaning and sanity.  For us and our children.

We want a career that embodies our Dream. 

We want real work with real meaning and real rewards.  We want to make a meaningful contribution, express our talents and follow our interests.  For us and our children.

We want growth. 

We want the tools to reinvent ourselves as often as we choose to in this constantly changing world.  We want to learn whatever we need in order to excel at our priorities.  We want affordable, efficient, stimulating education and access to enriching experiences.  We want genuine spiritual growth.  For us and our children.

We want real leadership. 

We demand truth, not spin or hype.  We want leadership of vision, substance and honesty.  In our homes, factories, stores, schools, banks, and  churches everywhere.  For us and our children.

The change levers of the 4th American Revolution.  The first four dimensions of Relationships, Lifestyle, Career and Growth are the make-or-break factors in living the life of our dreams.  The 5th factor, Leadership, is the X factor.

We are that X factor.

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What Are We Teaching Our Children?

The educational question of the century is, “Are we even teaching the right things?” Daniel Goleman’s research on emotional intelligence confirms that high IQ has a low correlation to high life success (Goleman, Daniel, 2005). Emotional intelligence. Bantam Publishing.The most important factors in life are not as much mental as emotional. Emotional Intelligence includes :

Self-Awareness - Knowledge about our personal strengths and weaknesses and our impact on others.

Self Control - Trustworthiness, responsibility, and impulse control.

Goal Achievement - Willingness to sustain creative efforts to achieve worthwhile goals.

Empathy - Awareness of, and caring about, others’ needs, feelings and concerns.

Social Wisdom - Ability to influence, negotiate, communicate, collaborate and form lasting bonds.

These skills are not controversial. They are not part of a religious or political agenda. The research validating their essential utility is overwhelming. These skills are the common sense equipment any parent would want their children to have. They are fundamental to a successful, happy individual life and a high-functioning society.

But millions of our children are not learning these skills or gaining emotional maturity. In many homes, these skills are neither taught nor modeled. This is not just an inner city problem. In lots of middle class homes, family life has disintegrated to community living arrangements. Parents are little more than roommates living high-speed, separate lives while their children live in entertainment-saturated luxury suites, isolated from adults, operating with digital identities and running with their tribal peer groups.

We’ve reached a critical mass. For society to work, we must institutionally teach emotional intelligence to our children. Only then will they have the self-awareness, self-control, self-discipline, and selfless motivations to be high-functioning humans. There is no mystery about how to teach these skills. We know how. We just have to want to.

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