Most of the times I have guessed wrong it was in the area of thinking that each of these cases carried a threshold beyond which a cold light of reality would dawn, and finally (!) substantive political decisions and actions would be taken.

I’m not so sure that I believe that anymore. There is sufficient irrationality, denial, and greed (dare we say it–evil?) out there to take us over the occasional cliff with our eyes wide open and foot to the floor.

Character hardly innoculates against all of this, but it certainly has made all the difference often enough in history to warrant first place in any efforts at education.

Plato in his “Republic” thought so. He was right then, and he is right now.

Let’s hope that we can find enough of it in our culture to work our way out of the maze.

Good points, and I agree. In the 4th Generation Warfare world, state are becoming less and less relevant. But, I still think the leader of our nation needs to point out and at least guide the powers to be in the right direction.

I am also in agreement that we have to rely less on a massive Federal beauracracy to fix all of our problems, and decentralize to the local level. With Federal solutions come larger beauracracies, more regulations, more taxes for small results.

Thanks again, Don

The inability of politicians to address hard issues, which you well describe, is a symptom of a deeper problem with the American body politic as a whole.

Because of globalization, the band of the North American continent known as the United States is becoming more and more of a geographic expression and less and less of a coherent social unit.

This is particularly the case with the economy where events overseas have massive impacts domestically while traditional tools of fiscal and monetary policy become less and less effective.

The simple point is that the viewpoint from Washington, D.C. , is becoming a less and less well focused perspective from which to address the various problems that confront us. Trying to solve problems federally is increasingly the proverbial pounding a round peg into the round hole of our social reality. And no amount of “strength of character” can change that.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8630135369495797236&q=origin+of+political+correctness&ei=J4wjSPraD4WqrwKmj6XCAg

I am going to talk more about the impact of what you provided good insights to in future blog comments in how to build and sustain strength of character.

Thanks for you good comments. Reference your great example about strategic leaders and the State Department, is one of the reasons I do what I do. It seems like nurturing strength of character is an exception vice the rule in almost any organization, maybe it is human nature as well as the corruption that has infiltrated into our culture.

Don

A basic skill of successful politicians is to gently re-frame provocative questions into a form that will support a smooth segue into their one of their talking points. I don’t see why more pols, when confronted with the umpteenth lapel pin or guilt-by-association dig or don’t confront their interviewers in a similar way and suggest they start asking about things that matter to people. It sure would be refreshing.

WRT political correctness, although it is the left that is accused of this more vocally, I believe the right’s use of it tends to have more insidious consequences. The Bush-Cheney-Rove cabal carefully built a narrative that conflated the 9/11 attacks with Iraq and its alleged WMD and was used to suppress debate and dissent in the run-up to the Iraq fiasco. Look where that has gotten us.

Similarly, one of the seldom-remarked upon drivers of the Vietnam morass was the political correctness inspired by the witch-hunts of the late 40s and early 50s that made it career suicide for national security bureaucrats in the late 50s and early 60s to suggest that the Vietnam insurrection might be anything other than pure communist subversion. It definitely was communist-led subversion, the people leading it were ruthless bastards, and subsequent history has shown that the success of the revolution was a disaster for the Vietnamese people. But the faith-based vs. fact-based strategic thinking that sucked the US into that morass prevented us from taking into consideration the burden of Vietnam’s colonial history, how we would inevitably inherit that burden with our intervention, and how we might play the situation to exacerbate the emerging split between the USSR and China, of which it was a bad career move to speak its name, instead of mitigating it by the way we involved ourselves in the Vietnam war.

I was in a class on terrorism a few years back and the instructors were Israeli. They had on the PowerPoint screen in BOLD words POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WILL GET YOU KILLED! I thought how true! Not only can the lack of character kill organizations, relationships, States and Nations. It can cost people their lives… Whats the cost of “anything goes?” Answer: Character goes with it!

What happened to integrity and truth? Tell me the truth, I may not initially like it, but I will be the better for it, in the long run!