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!
Fulfilling The American Promise in the Connected Age
The American Promise: Images of the Fulfillment
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
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
Wednesday, February 5, 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 18th 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
Sunday, February 2, 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)