New Site for FAPITCA

We decided to create our own website and enhance the blog so we could have more control over the way we present our narrative and allow for a more inclusive blogging environment. BlogPost has been a great way to start, but we're moving on to our own domain, NewAmericanCenter.org. We expect this notice to be our last entry on this BlogPost site for the foreseeable future. Thanks for joining us here over the last two weeks.

We invite you to visit us at Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age to follow and contribute to our effort. See you over there!

The Opportunity of the American Promise

A few years before he retired from the Army, Carl attended the National War College in Washington, DC. It was an amazing educational opportunity, attending classes under a premier faculty and studying shoulder-to-shoulder with members of all the military branches of the US and many of our allies and other international militaries. Equally importantly, the student body included representatives from all the branches and departments of our nation’s government. It was a truly rewarding year.

One of the things that the faculty reinforces to students at NWC is the old adage that “where you stand depends on where you sit.” Most students had probably heard that one before…it is an old adage, after all. What the faculty at NWC did, however, was to require in students’ discussions of policy and history that they look at things from others’ perspectives and indeed “sit” in a different chair, as it were.

That changes one’s context, of course. We begin to see why others might have a different take on history or why a proposed policy was really bad rather than good, no matter how well intended or timely it initially was. Such an exercise in context comes about from a sincere interest in helping us understand each other…helping us to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” or see through their eyes.

Too many Americans, and far too many of our elected and policy-making officials have forgotten how to do that, if indeed they ever learned. They choose to dismiss the American Promise of opportunity for all by focusing only on themselves or very narrow constituencies. All too many leaders choose to forsake an important function of leadership: develop and encourage followers to recognize and learn from opportunity. These kinds of “leaders” have chosen to keep opportunities to themselves rather than expand opportunity.

Perhaps the problem is that many Americans have forgotten what the word opportunity really means. The online version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “a favorable juncture of circumstances” or “a good chance for advancement or progress.” Unfortunately, many politicians and leaders tend to add the prefix of “photo” to the word opportunity and miss its real meaning completely.

Opportunity, a word we emphasized in the previous post, is the crux of the American Promise. America itself is a “favorable juncture of circumstances” with its rich body of natural resources, ideal geographical setting and innate essence that just inspires people to do great things and build amazing communities. From its very beginnings, America offered a “good chance for advancement” for both those who wanted community and those who sought to explore the wondrous wilderness in solitude. America offered then, just as it could now, almost limitless opportunity.

Opportunity in America has served as the engine that energized the imagination, spurred creativity and attracted some of the very brightest people on the planet to want to live here. It’s at the heart of the American narrative. However, for us to maximize the power of the national narrative of opportunity, we must be open to extending opportunity to all. We must come to understand that opportunity increases for all when we seek to share it.

The reality, however, is that while we have gained through opportunity, we have also lost ground seeking to withhold opportunity in America. Undoubtedly, there is less systemic discrimination in our nation than there was decades ago, yet problems persist as too many of us rationalize that we must discriminate to hold on to personal gains we achieved by protecting our own “hard-earned” opportunities.

That “hard-earned” stuff comes from the “American Dream,” not the American Promise. Working hard is important, but all of us who have had the privilege of working hard first had the blessing of opportunity before we could even think about hard work creating a benefit. When we mistake benefitting from working hard with holding opportunity too closely to ourselves, we show we really don’t understand opportunity or the Promise of America. Opportunity grows best for all when shared among all, not just individuals who think they earned something because they’re somehow special or work harder than others. Opportunity is the engine, hard work is the output.

This also means that America is not really a world of “winner take all”…it never has been: that’s a fictitious narrative that political entities and pundits seek to exploit. America is now and always has been a nation of community seeking the welfare of the public, with respect for individual rights, even as it has become ever more diverse in its 235-plus years. Since the beginning, our nation embraced public works to enhance our lives, such as public roads and waterways, land grant colleges and the protection of individual rights. These enhancements strengthened the American Promise of opportunity.

Institutional remedies, such as misguided political efforts to redefine equal opportunity as equal results, have clouded and confused the American Promise, no doubt. It was gratifying to see President Obama reflect more on opportunity than equality in his 2014 State of the Union speech, but of course that may have less impact than it should because it’s viewed as politics. Perhaps both political parties can find a way to achieve some agreement on equality of opportunity being a better way forward for America than “income inequality.” It would be a favorable step forward anyway, and more consistent with our Founders’ vision for America.

We’re going to keep emphasizing opportunity as the essence of Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age because it’s still the engine of our success. We’ll talk a lot more about opportunity in the connected age, as well. We hope to sway more people to “sit” in someone else’s “chair” and understand why opportunity is about more than just themselves, even if that chair is somewhere else in cyberspace. We’d like to demonstrate that opportunity is best savored when everyone has access to it…to show how opportunity is only constrained from growth when people decide to limit it.

America does not limit opportunity, but too many of its people do…let’s help stop that nonsense, perhaps even by “sitting in a different chair.” Please keep tuning in as we, and hopefully you, make a few modest proposals in future blog posts.

by Carl W. Hunt and Charles E. Hunt, 2/8/2014

Context and Synergy: Clarifying The American Promise

Our first little posting of a few images of America over the years and the modest explanation of the images’ relationship to the past, present and future was overly simplistic. Those images cover a lot of time and space. The initial post addresses almost nothing of the challenges we face as a nation today, experiencing a growing gap between “rich and poor,” “right and wrong,” “blue and red” or any other end points on a linear scale.

A simple truth, however, is that there really aren’t just two end points that pull us in one direction or another, nor is there a linear scale that positions each of us. Such an abstraction is not an element of the promise America held out nearly three centuries ago, nor is it relevant in the age of super-connected cyberspace. Entry points don’t exist at the right or left, or top or bottom of any scale because the connected age of cyberspace renders such scales useless as a frame of reference. In fact, the image of a linear scale only adds to the challenge of visualizing where we’ve come since the advent of cyberspace.

The American Promise, not to be confused with the American Dream, is that we can all succeed in this nation through equal access to the opportunities America has to offer. The promise also says that access might be achieved from many, many entry points. The promise is as much about the fairness and transparency of the process of access as it is about the outcome.

Our real challenge in fulfilling The American Promise today is to learn from the past to inform our present to prepare for our future in a way that accommodates our real needs, no matter where our entry point was. The fulfillment of the promise is based on our citizens and our leaders making certain no one is closed out because of where someone might have started on that so-called scale. Effective leadership at all levels and in all disciplines is critical to ensuring access to The American Promise.

It’s really been that way from the beginning of the nation but is now aggravated by the fact that we’ve grossly overlooked the failures of leadership in this generation. Somehow, our leaders encouraged us to collectively decide that what divides us was stronger than what united us as a nation. We say “collectively” because that’s been the result, whether intentional or not, of an aggregate of individual and group behaviors, aided by massive proliferation of the connecting technologies of cyberspace. These behaviors and technologies have changed The American Promise to something much different than it was even 25 years ago, something our leaders either failed to notice or consciously exploited.

The context of The American Promise is very modestly depicted in our images, intended to show the diversity of race and gender and interest and invention that made America what it is, and how it could offer so much promise to so many people. We should still be proud: as a nation relative to the rest of the world, we got off to a good start. Context was actually built into the Constitution of the United States even though it started out as a compromise based on the events that composed the perspectives of the late 18^th Century. The framers used a process that was open and understood by all as a key element of the context, and it’s paid off.

In spite of the compromises of that time and place, many good and some not so good, it has been our Constitution that also provides a synergistic power that we still tap today to keep The American Promise alive. All of us have experienced how the promise is constantly adapting to stay alive and offer an almost eternal hope for the future. That hope is what makes Americans so distinctive in this world. It’s just as a French person once told Chuck, “We admire you because you Americans think you can do just about anything. You don’t find that in Europeans. There is a sense of moderation and limitations I just don’t see in Americans. You guys think you can do anything, and you know what? You are often right because you believe in yourselves.” We still believe in the opportunity that is the core of The American Promise.

In this blog, our goal is to reexamine The American Promise, synergize it around the current social and technological contexts that exist in our day and the near future, and discuss how we all can benefit from both the promise and process of opportunity we believe our Founders intended to convey. The American Promise in the Connected Age is quite alive and capable of guiding not only Americans but all the citizens of the world to benefit from who we were and who we will be.

We may no longer be as exceptional as we previously thought, nor quite the once-powerful engine to fulfill the American Dream as many conceived in past generations. However, America is still capable of keeping its promise to be the pinnacle of opportunity, freedom and security. And, even though we may be changing, it’s encouraging to know we’re able to recognize these changes. A January, 2014 Pew Research Poll on the Growth of Inequality and the solutions we as a nation are thinking about across the span of political leanings, show that access to opportunity is still a major national objective – indeed at the core of The American Promise. It’s not about equality of outcome but equality of opportunity: a huge difference!

Bottom line: we must not sell ourselves short. Certain countries may exceed the US in a few select categories (higher average life expectancies, per capita wages, lower rates of gun violence, higher math scores, etc.), but there is no other country that has a better “all around package” that emphasizes access to opportunity. Even with our occasional blunders both at home and outside the US, this is absolutely no time to be selling ourselves short.

No, this is a time we need to proudly hold The Promise more closely than ever. This is a time to keep our focus on addressing the places we fall short, especially at home. Moreover, this is a time for a sober yet optimistic reassessment of where we are today, informed and inspired by the dreams of our founders but, equally importantly, reflecting the world in which we find ourselves now.

So, please go back and look at our very modest collection of images again. Roll up your sleeves and get ready for a sober, yet optimistic assessment of where we are and what we need to do to take the best advantage of it. Observe the context and what we must synergize to fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age.

Get on board with us and make this a better discussion.

by Carl W. Hunt and Charles E. Hunt, 2/4/2014

The Context and The Synergy

These images represent some of the things that made us who we are. The connected world in which we live makes us who we'll be. We'll discuss the synergy of past and future that make us what we are now and the actions that we can take to move us forward in fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.