Category Archives: Current Affairs

Disenfranchisement and Hopelessness

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What does it mean to be disenfranchised? What does disenfranchisement have to do with Hopelessness?

The most common use of the term disenfranchised has been associated with the right to vote. People who are disenfranchised are not permitted to participate in their own governance. More generally, it could refer to the loss or denial of any of the civil liberties to which a free people are entitled, under the law. Typically, when we say that someone is disenfranchised we are talking about people from whom something has been taken away.

We have chosen to expand the term to include people who have essentially disenfranchised themselves. These are individuals who no longer believe that what they do, think, or say matters to their community, their nation, or society. In this case, disenfranchisement is a voluntary abdication of one’s responsibility to participate in one’s own governance. This type of disenfranchisement flows from hopelessness.

Human beings experience hopelessness when they no longer believe they have control over their own destiny or over the outcomes in their lives. Literally tens of millions of people, in this great nation of ours, have lost hope. They no longer believe that the American people, as a whole, care about them. They no longer believe that anyone is interested in listening to their complaints of woe let alone take action to address those complaints. They no longer believe in the “American Dream.”

It is easy for the rest of us to shout out in pious righteousness that these people need to do something for themselves but, literally, these people do not see anything they can do. That’s what it means to be powerless. Hopelessness and powerlessness are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other.

We tell them to get a job, but there are no jobs for them that will enable them to support their families. They can work somewhere for minimum wage but no employer is going to give them a sufficient number of hours per week that would obligate the employer to offer benefits. They can make a better living on Welfare. The argument that Welfare offers no advancement opportunities is meaningless to people who cannot envision something better. We must be able to envision if we are to believe.

When faced with serious injury or illness of a family member, the disenfranchised know that the American people are prepared to let them suffer. They know that every other developed nation in the world, apart from “the land of the free and the brave,” has addressed this issue of access to healthcare. Americans, however, steadfastly refuse to provide healthcare to all Americans. Even when the President of the United States has pushed through healthcare reform legislation in the form of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), however imperfect, the opposition attacks it relentlessly. The message that the disenfranchised hear, loudly and clearly, is that the majority of Americans “do not want us to have quality medical care for our families nor are they willing to pay for that care.”

Mainstream Americans are frustrated that so many people have become dependent on the government for welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. We cry out, “What more do you want?” We do not understand why these people express resentment rather than gratitude.

When, in the face of our staggering national debt, all the disenfranchised hear from those in power are proposals to cut food stamps, welfare benefits, or other entitlement programs; why would they feel anything other than resentment?

What Americans need to wake up to is the idea that this reality with which we are confronted is a consequence of decisions we have made over the last seventy years. We created this monster called welfare. It was intended to make sure that poor mothers could care for their children but the reality is that it succeeded only in trapping huge populations of Americans in a reality that is little more than second-class citizenship.

It used to be that even the poorest of the poor would see an education as a ticket out of poverty and as a stepping stone to the American Dream. In most urban communities, the disenfranchised no longer believe in education as a ticket to anywhere other than free day care. What they know is that huge percentages of their children are failing in a school system that is also second class. When we offer voucher programs to help families put their children in better schools we are sending a subtle but powerful message that America has given up on urban public schools.

The fact is that the only parents that take advantage of vouchers are people who still cling to hope and some vestige of the American Dream. The other significant fact is that unless the parents who opt to take advantage of vouchers are also willing to accept responsibility as partners in the education of their children and ferociously encourage their sons and daughters to work hard at school these kids will be no more successful in their new schools than they were in their old ones. Many “charter schools” and other schools that admit “voucher children” to their classrooms are finding this out as they see their school’s declining scores on state competency exams.

So, let’s think about this for a moment. We have an expanding population of poor Americans who:
• Are third- or fourth-generation beneficiaries of welfare
• Cannot gain access to anything more than the minimal level of healthcare for their children and little or no healthcare for themselves,
• Who cannot find jobs that pay better than minimum wage and that offers enough hours to qualify for benefits,
• Who see their children fall so far behind in school that “failure” seems inevitable, and
• Who hear elected officials and policy makers demand that we cut entitlement programs rather than increase taxes paid by the wealthy and the middle class.

Why in the world would we expect these men and women to believe in an American Dream that is nothing more than an illusion for them and an empty promise for their children?

Welfare and other programs that teach people to be dependent rather than independent and interdependent are a cancer that is eating away the heart and soul of our nation.

We must acknowledge, as we move further into the Twenty-first Century, that the policies that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out. We desperately need new ideas and new solutions. We need to think exponentially and challenge all of our assumptions about the way our society provides for the poor, takes care of the sick, and educates our children.

How much longer can we expect working men and women of our nation to continue to carry the burden of a burgeoning population of poor and disenfranchised people on one end of the productivity continuum, and population of retirees that is growing at an unprecedented rate on the other? What happens to our status as the leader of the free world when our economy buckles under the oppressive weight of the retired and the dispossessed?

In a few weeks, I will be introducing my latest book entitled, Re-inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century. It is a book that offers a strategic action plan to address major components of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. In this book, I suggest that our systems of education, both public and private, offer the best hope for attacking the problems we face as a society and for bringing the disenfranchised back into a game in which their contributions are desperately needed.

My book Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, published in 2002, already offers a solution for providing universal healthcare and prescription drugs at a price that we can afford; and, in a way that relies on free market forces, not government, to drive quality, cost, and accountability.

Many people have branded Radical Surgery, sight unseen, as just another proposal for socialized medicine. If they would set aside their prejudices and open the book they would learn that Radical Surgery rejects socialized medicine and offers another alternative. It is an alternative, however, that requires that we open our minds to a whole new way of thinking about healthcare.

Implementation of the very specific strategies offered in these two books, Re-Inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream and Radical Surgery, will provide a realistic opportunity to re-engage the disengaged members of our community. The consequence of seeing this population continue to grow will be nothing short of apocalyptic, which is what my novel, Light and Transient Causes, has been written to illustrate.

Should not our Schools Be Set Up On the Basis of How Children Learn?

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One of the principles of Positive Leadership is to challenge people to re-think their underlying assumptions about why we do what we do. Education in America provides a perfect example of a system that demands a complete re-examination.
Think about the way children learn to walk or ride a bike. Children learn these things very much the same way as they learn almost everything else. We provide lots of encouragement and many of opportunities to practice whatever it is they are striving to learn. We understand that some children learn more quickly than others and when we are teaching them to walk or ride a bike we do not push them to learn any more quickly than they are able. We know that the only thing that matters is the fact that they do learn. When children make a mistake while learning to walk or ride a bike, they fall down. When that happens, we pick them up, give them give them a hug or a kiss, dust them off, and we encourage them to try again.
What we do not do is tally the number of times they fall nor do we diminish the degree to which we celebrate their ultimate success based on the number of mistakes they made along the way. We also do not push them ahead before they are ready. If we are helping two children learn how to walk, simultaneously for example, and one child catches on quickly, we do not stop working with the child who is struggling. Neither do we begin teaching both children, ready or not, how to run. Riding the bike is the same way. When the first child to learn takes off on her own, we do not push the second child to take off in pursuit and we certainly do not start teaching them both to develop more advanced skills. Rather, we give each the attention they need appropriate to their progress.
We continue to work with the child who struggles and we do so patiently, providing lots of support and encouragement. Once both children are walking or riding proficiently, we do not remind the latter child that their counterpart learned more quickly and we do not celebrate the quicker child’s success more lavishly. The reality is that, once both have learned, one walks or rides every bit as good as the other. It no longer matters, in the least, that one took longer to learn than the other.
Now, think about the way we teach children in the overwhelming majority of our schools. We present a lesson to the entire class and we encourage them to practice, both at school and at home. We call it homework, not practice. The next day, we gather up all the homework and we grade it and spend some time going over the most common mistakes that students make in an effort to help them learn from their mistakes.
Then we do three things that are pretty incomprehensible when you think about it. The first is that we do not devote extra time the students who made the most mistakes.
Secondly, we record either the grades each child earned on their practice and factor those scores into their final grade at the end of the grading period, semester, or school year; or, we give them credit for completion of the homework and this also is factored in to the grade the child is given at the end of the grading period.
The third unfathomable thing we do is to move the entire class on to the next lesson in our textbooks or syllabus, ready or not.
The fact that one or more of our students is poorly prepared for the next lesson might trouble us, but the expectation of the entire American educational system is that we have to move everyone along to make sure we cover all of the material identified by the educational standards that drive our curricula and our competency testing process. We also label the students who learned more quickly and successfully as “A” or “B” students or “honor” students and, we label the slower kids as “C”, “D”, or even “F” students. We may or may not feel some sense of concern that these labels may follow our students well into the future but that’s the way it is done and so we shove our reticence aside and plunge ahead.
If we look closely and carefully, we will probably be able to tell that the kids we have labeled as “A” or “B” students seem to be having more fun and demonstrate more enthusiasm for learning than the “C, D, or F” students. In fact, it does not take long before it is pretty obvious that the latter group of children is having no fun at all and are demonstrating a diminished enthusiasm for learning. Oh, well, as the saying goes, “it is what it is!”
We observe this even though each and every one of us understands that it is as much fun to learn successfully and as it is demoralizing to fail repeatedly. How often do we refuse to play a game at which we habitually lose?
If we were to examine this practice from a positive leadership perspective, what an educator, school principal, school superintendent, or educational policy maker would do would be to step back and begin to question what we are doing and why. These positive leaders would begin to challenge some of their assumptions about why we do what we do, the way we do it.
The truth is that every time we push a child on to a next lesson before they are ready we are setting him or her up for failure. It is this practice, as much as anything else we do, that leads to an unhealthy focus on failure throughout our entire systems of education.
If you are reading this post, you are challenged to begin asking some serious questions of our professional educators and policy makers.

A Call To Action!

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As a result of decisions we have made as a society, since the end of World War II, a society of second class citizens has emerged. These Americans are not full participants in American enterprise. It would be accurate to say that they withdraw far more value than they contribute. Many of these men and women have effectively
disenfranchised themselves and why should we be surprised by this. These are Americans who receive a lousy education from a system of public education that is unable to meet their needs; have little or no access to healthcare to attend to their own medical needs as well as the needs of their families; and, if they are employed at all, they have low paying jobs with no eligibility for benefits and no opportunities for advancement.

This population is like a cancer growing in our body, sapping away our strength and vitality. There is a tipping point at which our nation will begin an irrevocable and unalterable decline.

That there is an equally large and growing population of retirees who are checking out of the game at an age from which they are likely to live another quarter of a century, adds greatly to this burden. It does not matter that these retiring men and women have worked hard for their entire lives to earn their Social Security, Medicare and pensions. These facts do not change the economic dynamics that make this population a burden to the Americans in the middle who must work harder to pay the bills. Fortunately, many of these men and women have invested well and their money is working for us even if they are not. The majority of these Americans, however, are dependent on Social Security and Medicare for their survival.

While both of these populations, on opposite ends of the age/productivity continuum create special challenges it is the first group of Americans about which we must be most immediately concerned.

We can neither continue to support this dependent population nor can we continue to enable their dependency and entitlement mentality. Neither can we ignore them; pretend they will disappear; deport them; or, otherwise rid ourselves of them.

The only answer, therefore, is to bring them back into the game as full functioning and productive members of our team, of American Society. Yes, I understand that this will not be an easy challenge to meet or goal to accomplish. The truth, however, is that if we do not find a way to shrink this population and pull them back into the game as contributing members, they will destroy us. The bottom line, then, is that we have no choice but to find a way to win them over to our side.

We can do this by:
1. Reinventing and re-selling the American Dream, and
2. Giving these Americans men and women realistic hopes that the dream can be real for them or, at least for their children.

We accomplish the first by using our unsurpassed talent for marketing and selling products and services. Only this time, we will be selling an idea in which people can believe and to which they can subscribe.
To achieve the second objective, we must re-invent our systems of education in such a way that we not only offer pertinent subject matter but also teach children how to succeed. We are not talking, here, about incremental reforms rather we are talking about a transformation. We must also transform our healthcare system to one that provides high quality, comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs to all Americans at a price that we can not only afford but that will save trillions of dollars over the next decade.

Impossible, you say?

Accomplishing these things is not only possible it is imminently doable if only we use our imaginations to think exponentially and open our minds to the reality that anything we can imagine, we can do.

Given the extent to which China, Europe, Japan, India, and other developing nations are challenging our supremacy in the international marketplace, we have not a nanosecond to spare. This is clearly the categorical imperative of our time. We cannot continue to trudge down the dry and dusty paths of political dogma, conventional wisdom, or business as usual. We must demand that our elected representatives cease their paralyzing bickering and begin working together in what is a conflict of historical proportions in which the very survival of our nation and way of life is at risk. Never has our very survival as a nation been at greater risk.

You are urged to take this threat seriously and to make a commitment to change the direction our nation is taking. This blog, THE LEADerThinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the American Dream, is here to serve as a catalyst to get people like you involved and to overcome the inertia that keeps people from doing what they know is right. This blog can support you but it is your leadership that will make a difference.

We will also offer articles on healthcare and education both of which, because of the minimal access to the former and the low quality of the latter, contribute significantly to the disenfranchisement of those whom we describe as virtual second-class citizens. Improving the quality of education and the quality, access, and cost of healthcare provide the best point of attack in bringing back this population of men and women who have lost their faith in the American Dream. We cannot invite them back on the basis of empty promises. We must give them real and demonstrable changes.

My book, Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, published in 2002, addresses the challenges of healthcare and offers an achievable solution that is the antithesis of socialized medicine and that can save the American people trillions of dollars over the next decade.

My book, The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leadership will show the reader how every man and woman can be apply the power of positive leadership to bring about changes in the world in which they live and interact.

My book, Re-Inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, scheduled for release in a few weeks, recommends a very specific plan of action to re-invent education and to increase the level of commitment of parents to become partners in the education of their children. Changing these things will bring about dramatic changes in the motivation of our children to learn as much as they are able, as quickly as they can, according to each child’s innate abilities and interests.

My novel, Light and Transient Causes, is a story of just one possibility of what could happen in the U.S. if we are unable to address these issues effectively.

Please join me in this campaign by:
-Subscribing to this Blogs RSS feed.
-Following me on Twitter and LinkedIN,
-Encouraging your family, friends and associates to join you in this effort, and
-By applying the principles of positive leadership to help bring about a transformation of American society.

Remember the words of Jane Goodall:
“The most important thing you can do for the future of the world is to realize that what you do matters.”