[Originally published in Groundhog Day on September 5, 2005. There was a link to a WSJ opinion piece in the original. The link is now dead.]
There is much discussion underway in weblogs and in opinion pieces in the press regarding what changes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the dismal performance of the leaders of our government may bring. This is a good thing.
I'm not sure what I have to add to that discussion.
One of my most persistent frustrations with writing and maintaining first Time's Shadow, and now, Groundhog Day, is that I am not a disciplined writer. When I am motivated to write, it is often because of some emotion, usually negative. As a result, I'm often writing against some idea, and I know people enjoy reading more positive things, or at least the occasional respite from a constant litany of complaint. I have made at least one change in my writing habits, and that has been to file many of my more vituperative posts in a topic that never gets published, which I call The Cooler. Sometimes a post will make it out of there after I edit it a bit, but usually they just stay there.
This is another instance where the throbbing vein in my temple seems to compel me to put down in photons my thoughts about a particularly bad idea. If I wait to calm down, when I try to write, it becomes more laborious and I become more pedantic. I begin to bore myself. So, I'm going to struggle here to try and keep this piece out of The Cooler, try to make something of a compelling argument, and try to stay interested while doing it.
The thing that's got me rather exercised right now is a link Doc Searls pointed to in the Wall Street Journal. I'll go back to beating up the idea that markets are conversations some other day, but right now I want to beat something else up.
I went to the piece in the WSJ because Doc called it "instructive lessons," and I wanted to see what those lessons were. In fact, there are no lessons there. Instead, there is the usual justification for the predictable response of the Journal, and that is that we should outsource or privatize the business of disaster preparedness. This is a knee-jerk, ideological response that will gain traction among those who always seem to believe that the private sector has better answers than the public one.
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I've seen the private sector at work in things like Enron and Halliburton and Merck and Boeing and Microsoft and oh, I don't know, check with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, he might have a couple more he could name. But I don't happen to think that the private sector has a monopoly on virtue. And bureaucracies exist in the private sector just as much as they do in the public one, which is just one of the many reasons why markets are not "conversations." There is no immunity to inertia through incentivization.
For a while, after 9/11, some pundits opined that the event would mark some watershed in American history, that it was the end of the Age of Irony. They were wrong. We do have a problem in this country, but it's not going to be solved by a particular economic "sector." There's no faith-based program to address this particular need. There's no catchy slogan, no social software solution, no pill, no gene therapy, no stem cell, no Supreme Court decision that's going to fix what's wrong with this country. But then, there doesn't need to be, because what's wrong can be fixed by you and I. Indeed, it will only be fixed, if you and I fix it.
I'm not an ideologue. I don't have any particular view of the world that I want to promote, other than maybe two ideas: First, know thyself. And second, you must become the change you wish to see in the world.
I'll tell you a sea story. Maybe two.
I'm pretty sure I've told this one before either here or in Time's Shadow, but that's in the nature of sea stories, they tend to be repeated.
When I was executive officer of USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD-981), I had to perform my first burial at sea. Up until that time, I don't recall having ever done one before. I certainly hadn't participated in the ceremony. That was about to change.
My job as the XO was to commit the decedent's cremains to the sea. Cremains are what are more commonly called "ashes." There's a burial at sea ceremony spelled out in some navy instruction or another, and the Captain presides over it. It was conducted on the fantail (that's the ass-end of the ship) and there were people there to render honors and there was a gun salute, and the whole thing was videotaped to provide a record for the family. So at the end of this rather somber, somewhat elaborate ceremony, I ceremoniously marched to the stern of the ship, removed the top of the container and poured the cremains over the side.
And the first time I did it, the wind swirling around the stern caught the ashes and blew most of them back up onto me in my dress blues and the deck of the ship.
I was not a happy guy.
It's pretty creepy having some guy's ashes all over your face and your uniform. But I remained "in character" until the end of the ceremony. Needless to say, I was glad it was over and I sincerely hoped I'd never have to do it again.
Except I did have to do it again. It came as a surprise, but shortly after we did the first one, we were tasked to do another one. Then they started coming in twos and threes. I worked with the Officer of the Deck to ensure we placed the ship in a favorable position with respect to the wind such that I wouldn't repeat my first experience, and while it was something of a pain in the ass, it wasn't a huge deal either. Just one more thing I had to do, so I just did it.
After each ceremony, we boxed up a national ensign, a chart showing the location of the burial, the videotape of the ceremony, the shell casings from the gun salute and a letter from the CO and sent them to the family. My navigator, who was also the admin officer, was in charge of that. I don't know how many we had done by this point, but Murphy's Law finally made its appearance and at some point we sent the wrong mementos to the wrong families. They were, understandably, rather upset and they conveyed their unhappiness back through the chain of command, whereupon I received direction that I would personally inspect the contents of each package before it left the ship and it would be sealed in my presence. Which, again, is no big deal, but it was a kind of pain in my ass.
And for a while, that's pretty much how I regarded doing burials at sea, as a pain in my ass.
Except I kept having to do them. I don't recall exactly how many I did, but it was more than thirty, maybe close to forty. And there was a rehearsal for each one, and of course there's each ceremony. Plus the packaging up of the mementos, which had me reading these guys' DD-214s or other discharge papers, and getting just the barest glimpse of what had been a life. So I began to think about this whole thing a lot. I found out that the reason why we were doing so many burials at sea was because many of the families of these guys couldn't afford a casket burial. Some of the "families" were really fairly distant relatives who were kind of stuck with the disposition of the body after their relative died. A few were really old guys, most were veterans of WW II or Korea, a few more recent. But the more I thought about these guys and the fact that, for many of them, there was nobody available to see to their end, to the final disposition of their earthly remains, the more I began to feel as though I had some sort of responsibility to them, to these guys I had never known and who never knew me.
Now, I don't know if any of these guys had ever given any thought to how they were going to be treated after they'd died. For all I know, they didn't care. Maybe some of them did. I don't know. I don't know if any of the families thought that the Navy would do for their relative what they couldn't do themselves in a manner that they would care about. About all I ever knew about these guys was their date of birth, date of death, period of service and an address to mail the package.
But they became something different to me. I don't know, I guess I thought that if it were me, I'd like to think the guy doing the thing would do it right. I can't really describe what the change was, other than it was no longer a pain in my ass. I won't say that I felt like it was a privilege, because, truthfully, I didn't want to do it. But I began to feel like I owed something to that box of ashes, which is about as irrational a thought as I've ever had, and I've had a few. So while it wasn't a privilege, I did see it as a duty, and one to be taken as seriously as any other important duty, perhaps more so in some respects.
I don't know how many burials I did after coming to that, less than half I'd say. But that experience was to kind of play a role later on when I began to understand something else I'd never really thought about before.
So here's another sea story, although this one doesn't strictly take place at sea. I was on shore duty at the time. And again, I'm sure I've probably told this story before too. Hopefully, the inconsistencies aren't too obvious or damning.
I was the XO of Fleet Training Center, and at the time of this story, I think I was the acting CO. I had two periods of three months' duration when I got to be the acting CO after my boss had retired without relief. Didn't mean a great deal different for me, I still got the same paycheck, and I didn't move my office; but I did have to preside over the various ceremonies in the capacity of the CO, rather than the XO, which means I was usually the guy doing all the fun stuff, like handing out the awards and stuff.
Anyway, one day, one of our sailors was getting ready to retire, and we usually have a fairly elaborate retirement ceremony for them. As the CO, I'd be the guy to present the award and all the plaques and letters and stuff a retiree normally gets. Usually there's a guest speaker, someone from the retiree's career or life who gives a speech about the retiree's career and tells a few embarrassing stories and what a great person they were and all that, as you might imagine.
So this sailor comes into my office one day and asks me to be her guest speaker. Now, I've never served with this individual before, and we've only been together at FTC for about a year, but she wants me to say a few words about her at her retirement. It floored me. I'd been to dozens of retirement ceremonies before, usually as a member of the audience, a few times as the master of ceremonies, but I'd never been asked to speak about someone before.
So that was a hard one. Of course I said I would, but I really had no idea what I would talk about. I pulled her personnel record and reviewed her career. I thought about what I knew about her from our time together at FTC. And then I got to thinking about this whole retirement ceremony thing.
I'd never really thought about it before. Of course, my own would be coming up a couple of years later, but I wasn't thinking much about that at the time either. If you'd asked me what I thought about them before then, I'd have told you they were just another one of those things I had to do as a part of my job.
When I began to think about it, one of the first things that occurred to me was the burials at sea and what that ceremony ultimately "meant." And I went on to think about the nature of ceremonies and why we went to the trouble of having them. To be honest, I had never thought much about it before. They were always just a part of Navy life. You don't have to think about what it means, you just have to show up. But somehow, when you have some part to play in it, you tend to think about what it means, or what it is supposed to mean.
I began to think about the word honor, because we did these things, supposedly, to honor, the person who was retiring. And so I wondered what that meant, because I had never really thought about that before either. So I did what I often do, I consulted a dictionary. Honor, the verb, means to regard with great respect, or to fulfill an obligation, or keep an agreement. It was the second sense of the verb that I focused on, perhaps because of my experience with the burials at sea. I had, without really thinking about it, been acting to fulfill an obligation to those dead veterans, and I thought about what that meant to me.
And I thought about the retiree, who was, most assuredly, still alive at her ceremony. What was my obligation to her? What was my role? Why was I going to be up there in front of the rest of our command? And from those questions, I found answers that eventually turned into my speech for her. It must have been a pretty good speech, because afterward, a lot of people came up to me to talk about it and I ended up getting a lot more requests to speak at retirement ceremonies.
And that's probably enough sea stories.
What follows isn't that speech, but it's based on what I learned when I was thinking about it. There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We "honor" individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It's about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It's about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don't think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one's fellows.
Leadership is the act of renewing and strengthening that faith. Leadership is embodying that faith and living it, having it be a part of one's life, recognizing that each of us is a part of something greater than ourselves, and that's not our company or our corporation.
I couldn't be incentivized to care about the people whose ashes I consigned to the sea's embrace. I got the same paycheck whether I cared about them or not. I couldn't be incentivized to talk about things like faith and keeping that faith with one another. I could have stood up there and told a few jokes, highlighted the achievements of my retiree's career and gotten away from that podium without ever breaking a sweat.
It was easy, when we would be working hard training at sea, to understand why we were working so hard. If we didn't work hard during a main space fire drill, we knew many of our shipmates might die, and we might lose the ship. There's no place to run in a fire at sea. We knew when we were working hard during general quarters drills why we were working so hard, because otherwise shipmates, both our own and those on other ships, might die if we didn't get the job done. The fear of death is a pretty good incentive. But there are a million things we do that are inconvenient, many that are hard, that have nothing to do, directly, with staying alive. But they have everything to do with being a part of something larger than ourselves. We lose sight of those things too often. Indeed, for myself, I never had sight of them until I was put into the middle of them and had to wonder why I was doing this? Who cares about a box of ashes of some stranger? Certainly, he was beyond caring.
Being in the Navy, or any branch of the military, is a form of public service. Part of what some people call the public sector. Something we've lost sight of is the meaning and the value of public service. Like our infatuation with our clever technologies, we've become enamored with the many supposed virtues of the marketplace, and its rewards for efficiency. But where is there room in the marketplace for keeping faith with one another? Faith isn't a commodity that can be bought or sold. If there is a place, how does it compare in priority with things like maximizing shareholder value, or the bottom line? Who is the competition when it comes to keeping faith with one another?
What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.
That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.
That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.
That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was a result of each of us failing to keep faith with each other. Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said that people usually get the kind of government they deserve. I guess that's true, even if it is essentially blaming the victim; it often seems like most of our wounds, individual and collective, are self-inflicted. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
I've seen a lot of people calling for the sacking of Michael Brown, a political appointee and someone who is patently not qualified for the job, let alone someone who's ever had to exercise leadership. I'm certainly not opposed to sacking Brown. But sacking Brown isn't enough, and if we settle for that, it serves the interests of those whose failures were, in many ways, even greater. At the very least, we ought to demand of our president that he ask for the resignation of Secretary Chertoff.
But even more, somewhere out of all this hot air must come a discussion, an argument, (not a "conversation") about the value of public service, the role of leadership, an examination of authority, responsibility, and accountability. We need to take a close look at that "social fabric" that supposedly binds us as a nation. Is it nothing more than a blind faith in the "invisible hand" of the marketplace? How can what is presumably "the best of us," so grievously fail "the least of us?" What do we expect from our leaders in the way of leadership, at all levels of government? And don't look to our so-called "leaders" to lead this discussion.
I've seen a lot of folks wondering what "we" can do to address this situation, and, predictably, people are focusing on technological solutions, when what we have is not a fundamentally technological problem. It's something far less physical. It's a crisis of faith, it's a kind of identity crisis about who we are as a people and what we say we believe. Because there's a disconnect, an enormous chasm, between what we say we believe and how we manifest that belief in the leadership we choose and the other choices we make. So if you want to try to begin to "solve" this problem, I'd say your time would be better spent there than in advocating a particular technology. I will note that many of those who do will be doing so while angling for some competitive advantage in the marketplace.
I'd like to say I'm optimistic, or that I'm hopeful this will be the watershed event many thought 9/11 was. I'm afraid I'm not. I look back at the events that made many of these values meaningful to me, and maybe I'm just a slow learner, but I don't see very many people having similar kinds of experiences. I don't know how to articulate that meaning in a compelling way, to make it meaningful for others. I don't know how to resolve the incongruity between a culture that believes life was created by a creator, but which embraces a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" view of its fellow creatures. I don't know how to check the embrace of "self interest" over "public interest." I'm not a marketer, and I don't know how to sell the truth, so I just try to tell it. I don't know if I have enough faith for all that.
I don't know if any of us does.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 15:27 Sunday, 17 March 2024