Inspirations

Well, it’s been a pretty good week here for me this week. For whatever reason, the stars all were in my corner, in both tangible and intangible ways – which is pretty cool to look back on.

Do you ever hear or see or learn something that just overwhelms you with the “rightness” of whatever it is? The song that just grabs your heart and squeezes, or the dance performance that takes your breath away or the "click" when something suddenly makes sense? I had a couple of those experiences this week.

First, I read “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. WOW. If you haven’t read this book, please, read it. Then donate to his efforts. It is not often that a book can bring me to tears of pure joy and happiness – that overwhelming “rightness” of being. This is a man who is truly fulfilling his destiny – and is helping thousands of others to fulfill theirs. Having been exposed to similar conditions here in Southern Afghanistan to what he describes in Pakistan and Northern Afghanistan, I know the truth that he speaks. It is so simple, yet so profound – education is the answer.

One of the basics I learned in a Physics class somewhere was “Nature abhors a vacuum.” This applies to education. The one thing common to all humanity is the innate desire to learn and grow, to become something more than we already are. If there is no formal process or curriculum for education, superstition, folklore, and myth will fill the resulting vacuum. This vacuum in predominantly Muslim countries has led to the rise of the Wahhabi Madrassas system, “schools” funded by a very narrow minded sect of Islam that teach nothing but victimhood and hatred, using select passages from the Holy Koran to justify and reinforce their teachings. Often, these Madrassas are little more than pre-paramilitary schools, designed to do nothing but create potential martyrs for Islam – and a very narrow slice of Islam, at that. As Mortenson and Relin explain in Three Cups of Tea, these Madrassas don’t teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, nor do they teach geography, chemistry, biology, or physics. They teach the “Lesser Jihad” through rote memorization of the Holy Koran, in Arabic, a language that most of the students never really learn to speak as a language, just becoming able to recite suras from the Holy Koran. (The “Lesser Jihad” is the challenge of bringing Islam to the uninitiated – most often seen as war on non-believers. The “Greater Jihad” is the battle within to become a better Muslim by following the Holy Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH )

The saddest part is that the Wahabbi financiers, generallywealthy Saudi and Gulf State individuals, seemingly practicing ‘zakat’, or the giving of charity - one of the five pillars of Islam,get it better than we generally do. They are pouring their money into building these Madrassas because there is no competition for the young minds and bodies, no other education system to counter them – until Greg Mortenson comes along, at least. The end of movie Charlie Wilson’s War said it all – we had been pouring in almost a billion dollars in military aid to the Afghan Mujihedeen per year, then the Soviets quit and withdrew. The next year, Representative Charlie Wilson tried to get a million dollars appropriated for reconstruction aid, some of which would have gone to schools, and was flatly turned down. We had “won”, doncha know. And in winning the battle, we began to lose what eventually became the war we are now fighting. I have to wonder if we had pursued reconstruction and education efforts in Afghanistan and the border areas of Pakistan through the 1990s, whether Osama bin Ladin would have found such ripe ground here when he was expelled from the Sudan in 1996. Three Cups of Tea should be the basis for how we help Failed States (and Nearly Failed States).

The second inspiration this week was much smaller in scale, but almost as moving. It was watching the performance of a 47 year old unmarried, unemployed woman named Susan Boyle on “Britain’s Got Talent”. Here is a middle-aged woman who has the courage to go out and sing on this potentially cruel program. She is not attractive in the conventional sense that is so important on television. You could see the audience and the judges preparing for a big laugh at this woman’s expense. She announces the song she will sing ("I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables- an inspirational song in itself) and you can see the judges rolling their eyes, girding themselves for what, from all appearances, must be a terrible performance. And then something absolutely magical happens. Something that happens often in movies, but so seldom in real life... the music starts, and she begins to SING! And I mean SING, with every ounce of her being – and it is wonderful, powerful – I mean she NAILS IT! The gasp from the audience is audible. The raw emotional impact literally brought audience members to their feet. Even Simon Cowell, notorious for his biting wit, is completely blown away, his expressions and body language while she sings show that he is moved as well. Check it out for yourself… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY . Thank you George for sending it to me - and thanks to Mark for forwarding it to make sure I saw it.

So there they are, my two inspirations for the week. They are completely different in form and function, but share the common thread of the triumph of the human spirit. I am still shaking my head in wonder at both of them, but I am extremely happy for the experience of them both, for they both touched me profoundly - I am a better person than I was before this week.

The Answer (as opposed to "The Secret")

I figured it out. It came to me while reading a memoir of our nation’s recent Iraqi adventure – a rather depressing read, by the way. This epiphany is so wonderfully simple, yet so awe inspiring in its applicability to every one of the current “issues” our country and we as a people face in the world. I can tell you “The Answer” for what is wrong in the world today. Are you ready for it? Can you handle the truth?

It’s this: Lack of Personal Responsibility and Accountability. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean, really, we’re all responsible people, right? We have our families, we have our bills, most of us are making the mortgage payment and putting food on the table – we are responsible grownups. But we are not. We have given up so much control of our lives to other people and other things that we don’t take the time to really know what we are doing. And, at a certain point, at some certain dollar value with lots of zeroes, Personal Responsibility and Accountability ceases to be a factor at all anymore.

Let’s start small. I had(!), as probably most of you do, most of my retirement savings in “Safe Long Term Investments” – IRA’s, Mutual Funds, 401K’s. But I really can’t tell you how any one of those financial vehicles differs from the other. My mutual funds send me a prospectus or synopsis or some kind of a report every six months and I can say I’ve actually looked at it – once or twice a decade or so, mostly to see where the "highly paid fund manager" (highly paid is defined as someone who makes more than twice as much as I do) thinks he should invest my and a bunch of “other people’s” money (remember that phrase – it’s key).

Do any of you really understand how these Accounts and Funds work? What exactly does a Fund or Account Manager do every day to earn that high pay? I know I have the picture in my head of an earnest individual (balding, rumpled suit, rolled up sleeves, green eye shade) who is tracking every one of the stocks in their funds every single day, looking at projections, reading profit and loss statements, wetting their finger and holding it up to see which way the financial winds are blowing, or something like that. Perhaps that is what they do, sometimes, but I bet they spend a lot of their time in meetings with other fund managers listening to Branch or Division Chiefs tell them that they are not making enough money for the firm itself. That they are paying out too much in commissions because they are trading stocks too often or paying out too many dividends to us investors, because – and this is part of the secret – it’s not really “our” money anymore – we have given it to “Them” to manage for us, because we cannot do it as well as they can. We have transferred our personal responsibility for our money and investments to “Them” and our money has become “Their Money”. But it’s not really “Their Money” like it was their “Their (Personal) Money”, it’s “Their (Other People’s) Money.” Either that or these places are something like LA Law or Ally McBeal reruns and everyone is chasing everyone else around to have an affair with… but I digress.

Once “They” (pronouns are going to kill me here) have the money, it is “Theirs”, the company’s. And the first rule for companies in business is to make money. So they use Their (Other People’s) Money to make more money, keep some of that and give some back to us, the investor/"other people". This serves two purposes, one, it makes us "other people" feel like we have been responsible with our money for it is increasing in value and it also increases the amount of money that “They” can then use to make more money because most of us just let the money accrue in the accounts. The money they keep for themselves pays those highly paid managers (and even more highly paid Branch and Division Chiefs) their paychecks and bonuses and puts fuel in the Gulfstream jets and all of that.

The problem with Their (Other People’s) Money is that they treat it like what it is – other people’s money. Ever wonder why used rental cars sell for so much less than “regular” used cars – it’s because people have driven them like they are rental cars – they are “other people’s" cars. In my last job I traveled quite a bit and the company would provide a rental car most places. Usually the cheapest thing with four wheels and an engine but it was better than the riding the bus in a strange town. And usually I would find that there was no need for a gas pedal – a simple switch to go from coast to full power was all I really needed most of the time – well, that and maybe a brake pedal. Short of trying not to wreck the car, there was no need to really take care of it, as it was basically an “other people’s" car” – not "my" car. And worse, if I did wreck it, there was insurance that would cover it, so I wouldn’t be out any of “My Money”.

So now the picture is clear – these people were using what once was “Our Money” that we transferred to them to become “Their (Other People’s) Money” like it was a bunch of rental cars. They knew that we wouldn’t pay close attention to what they were doing, and that if they wrecked it, the government would step in and insure them so they would not be out any of Their (Personal) Money.

There it is, the financial crisis in a nutshell, and we let them do it through our ignorance, trusting, and, in no small part, greed. But it’s worse than that. We are doing this with entire countries.

Since this epiphany came to me while reading about Iraq, let’s talk about Iraq. Our former President, aka "The Decider", decides to change the regime in Iraq, and does so. At that point he should have became personally responsible and accountable for what happened next. As every good executive does, he delegated authority to a highly paid manager, Paul Bremer, and sent him over to run the place. Unfortunately, this manager did not feel any sense of personal responsibility and accountability because even though it was his country to run, it was “His (Other People’s) Country” – and he drove it like a rental car, doing things that he would not have done if he felt that he would be personally held responsible for the consequences. So, he fires all of the Baath Party members that were the civil service of Iraq and disbands the Army – putting most of what we would have called the upper middle class out of work, all at once. Chaos follows, but this man has an insurance policy – the US Department of Defense. They will “pay off” and make his stupid decisions seem less stupid over time – to the tune of 4,000 plus US lives (and a bunch of Iraqi lives as well).

How about here in Afghanistan? Same thing. It is “NATO’s (Other People’s) Country” – nobody really gives a flying flip about outcomes beyond their tour of duty, and if they do, they soon become disabused of such silly notions (like when I was young and would actually take a rental car through the car wash before taking it back – I didn’t want to be thought less of for bringing back a dirty car). I’ve already written about the “not my job” and “I’m too short to worry about that” attitudes – “short” being a term used to describe coming up on the end of a tour of duty. The problem is that that attitude starts about the second or third day here for some people. And the Afghans are kind of like us with our mutual funds – they have handed the country over to us – the highly paid country managers – to make it better for them. Now they don’t have to take any personal responsibility either – it’s someone else’s worry. So if the generator runs out of oil because nobody checked it – Inshallah, ask NATO for another one. If half of my unit’s weapons disappear over time, no worries, ask NATO for new ones. We are their insurance policy, just like the Government is for the big banks.

Of course, the problem is, eventually it comes back to be “Our/My Money”, just as my diminished retirement accounts are now “My (much less) Money” and the Bailout/Stimulus (I’ve lost track of what is part of what anymore) is “Our Government’s (much less) Money, Iraq has already become “Our (lots and lots of) Money” and Afghanistan is fast becoming “Our (lots and lots more) Money”.

Colin Powell, it is apocryphally told, espoused the “Pottery Barn Rule” – If You Break It – You Buy It (Pottery Barn, for the record, disavows this as a “rule”). He knew that we were going to break Iraq, and we have bought it many times over since. We have broken Afghanistan (didn’t take much), and are buying it now, after putting it on layaway for a few years. We have broken our financial system, and now are trying to buy it back. But here’s the rub – Paul Bremer took no responsibility for his decisions and has not been held accountable for the consequences; none of the “highly paid managers” – to include Corporate CEO’s – of the American Financial Industry are taking any personal responsibility nor are they being held personally accountable (I don't count Madoff - he's just a crook), and the same applies to the leaders of the American Automobile Industry. Evidently, the buck does not stop with them. It’s passed to us. Harry Truman would be appalled.

Here’s the kicker – my friends with small businesses, restaurants, and such – they are forced to take responsibility and are held personally, financially liable. Why aren’t we holding our corporations and our government to the same standard as they hold us to? I once heard that if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, they own you and get to make the rules, but if you owe the bank a million dollars (probably billion now), you own them and get to make the rules – I guess that’s really true.

The Answer sucks, doesn’t it.