Independence Day | CorporateIntel

As our nation approaches another birthday, I find myself like many Americans feeling unsteady, shaken, and increasingly uncomfortable in holding onto a sense of connection to beliefs I never thought could be at risk. Shared values are essential to me, as is the ability to build consensus on difficult issues and a fundamental acceptance of diversity. A few critical points at the moment are eating away at me.

Respecting Secular Differences

The separation of church and state is something I have always believed cannot be denied in our nation. If this pillar falls, the rest crumbles with it. Of course, I know not everyone believes this, but I always thought the majority would never abandon it. Now I worry it might only take a cleverly constructed minority for it to no longer matter. That would forever undo the nation my family chose as a place to immigrate to several generations ago and call home. Is it possible today we would not be welcome here?

Thinking Through Laws

Originalism, or the notion that our Constitution can only be applied to the literal text of its authorship some two and a half centuries ago, seems impossibly flawed as an idea. This is a document that from its inception has encompassed the notion of revision as a core tenet of its foundation. It also has been amended multiple times in its existence to correct the injustices it has allowed, unintentionally or in ambiguity. Peeling back complex nuance is as critical to an argument as referencing precedent. Judges and lawyers cite case law to examine the relevancy and consistency of prior rulings, where opinions are molded into outcomes through rigorous thinking. If the U.S. Constitution does not require interpretation in its application on the endless topics it does not specifically reference—including innovations that couldn’t possibly have been contemplated in prior times—what is the purpose of higher courts?

Growing with Technology

Technology continues to advance exponentially at a rate that consistently outpaces our ability to understand its implications and effects. Without a nimble, advanced, multifaceted framework to consider legislation around innovations that previous generations could never have imagined, we will find ourselves acted upon by invention rather than fostering wise guidelines for incorporating discovery into our everyday lives. Think ahead another hundred years and try to envision what’s coming. Now try to envision how we will create daily norms around incorporating scientific and engineering achievements so far beyond our current imagination we have no concept of how we will be impacted. If we continue to apply yesterday’s rules to tomorrow’s frontier, we will fail much worse at finding common ground than we are now.

Winning and Losing

My sense is that the heightened divineness so many of us are experiencing is becoming increasingly debilitating. If our notion of winning and losing with each other does not evolve into a more palatable interchange of conflicting concepts, our inability to work through our differences could undermine this great experiment we call democracy. There are always individuals who benefit from pouring fuel on a fire and turning otherwise kind people against each other. We cannot let agendas we don’t share take precedence over the communities we cherish.

As we celebrate Independence Day in the midst of so much turmoil and dissonance, perhaps we should reflect on how blessed we could be if we rediscovered a broader sense of shared values, or at least could approach consensus on addressing our disagreements without knocking each other to the ground in the name of unnecessary polemics.

We can do better. We can be better. The alternative is staying where we are currently stuck, and that does not seem to be leading us to improvement. Commit to clearer logic, expanded empathy, and enthusiastic compassion. Let that be our muse this Fourth of July.

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Photo: Pixabay

This month our nation celebrated its 242nd birthday. As I was sitting in the stands at Dodger Stadium on July 4 watching a spectacular and patriotic fireworks display (following a wonderful midseason win) something quite obvious but strange occurred to me:

I have been alive for over 20% of our nation’s history.

That may not seem curious to you, but it does to me. No one in Russia, China, or most of western Europe can say that.

It is only because we are such a young nation that our lives constitute such a significant portion of our nation’s entire state of being.

I have been trying to put that in context. I am over a half-century in age, and the nation is less than five half centuries in age. For sake of context, I have tried to segment those de facto quintiles into what I have experienced as current events (the most recent 20%) and what I must study as history.

Latest 20%: Age of economic triumph, the information age, and age of civil rights.

Prior 20%: Age of two world wars, one Great Depression, and vast immigration.

Middle 20%: Age of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Second 20%: Age of Manifest Destiny & Industrial Revolution.

Initial 20%: Age of our Founding Fathers, American Revolution, and the visionary foundation of secular democratic governance.

It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time for all that to have happened when you think about it. I guess that’s because it really isn’t. What’s 242 years? These days, it’s about three full lifetimes. If you time them correctly, you could talk to someone who talked to someone who knew someone who experienced Independence Day as current events.

That’s just wild. Mind-boggling! And look how far we’ve come!

Or have we?

Well, we have sent humans to the moon and probes to Jupiter and Pluto. We have air conditioning, spiffy kitchen appliances, and running water in our homes (when we don’t run out). We have lots and lots of TV channels. We have supercharged computers in our pockets we call mobile phones. We have this Internet thing that has eliminated almost all barriers to information access and makes globalization a reality.

Yet we still fight a lot, among ourselves and with faraway strangers. It seems that in every one of those quintiles we fought a lot. Maybe fighting is a constant in almost every nation’s evolution. History would seem to reinforce that recurrence.

We haven’t had all that many U.S. presidents. Our current office holder is only number 45. Many recaps of U.S. presidents show that many of the individuals who held the office weren’t very good at it in hindsight. Luckily, there are a few most of us agree regardless of political affiliation will always be American heroes. There’s Lincoln. There’s Washington. I think it might start to get controversial after that.

I wonder if the top people in charge of running our nation day-to-day in all its complexity—whether elected officials or policy makers or military leaders or business executives or educators—are in awe of their 20% stage time. I doubt it. The truly influential people I know and the many I study from afar seem to like their gigs a lot, but in my observation very few of them seem in awe.

I also wonder how many of the leaders guiding our 20% are good listeners. Do they hear the studied voices among us? Do they listen for the quieter voices who choose not to enter the knock-down, drag-out drama of overpowering influences and powerful, conflicted mandates? Do they immerse themselves in understanding the previous 80% of our time as a nation where we might have emerged a winner but didn’t necessarily embrace a sense of humility and real justice in establishing a fair set of rules? Do they strive for a true sense of vision or just winning for bragging rights and lovely take-home prizes?

I also find myself thinking about things I have lived through largely from inception, particularly the rapid compounding of computer technology. I imagine this is how people felt who went from horses and buggies to the Model T, having seen automobiles take over roads that were created for drawn carriages. I can’t remember a time before air travel, but my dad can. When I think about his lifespan, the numerator and denominator tell me he has lived through almost a third of the nation’s history. He may achieve a beguiling 40%!

I thought life was breathtakingly scientific when I sat in front of a black-and-white CRT eating Space Food Sticks while NASA astronauts blasted into orbit. Now I write about that as nostalgia while pretty much every public document in human history is available to me by typing on this keyboard into a conceptual framework of storage we simply refer to as the cloud.

Why take pause on the magnitude of a quintile? I guess for one reason because I am naturally sentimental about milestones. All forks in the road of consequence inspire my introspection, giving me excuse if not reason to try to put into perspective the meaning of our timeline.

Yet more than that, I am particularly absorbed in trying to make sense of the coming quintile, which by all stretches of the imagination I will not see resolved. I suppose if lucky I may live to see our nation on its 275th birthday, but there is not chance I will see our Tricentennial.

Am I worried what we might become collectively between now and then? If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know the depth of my concern. I guess that will give me much to write about as we walk forward together through future milestone celebrations. Between now and then, I can only hope that the nation’s leadership does embrace the gravitas of our current context.

America is an idea more than anything. Promising ideas need to be nurtured, not battered.

Speaking of milestones, this happens to be my 200th blog post since I launched CorporateIntel in 2011. Along the way I have met hundreds of interesting new people both virtually and in person. Writing is a solitary endeavor until you push the Publish button on your text editor. This magnificent innovation has opened my life to so many minds I would never otherwise have encountered. When we share ideas and swap stories, technology goes into the background and our human thoughts take precedence over the engineering that facilitates our interactions. As long as human interaction and exchange overrides the technical wonder of its creation, you can count on me for another 200.

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Photo: Pexels