I’m Running for President — My Vision for America
Every leader must paint a vision — a desired future state. From what I understand, Vision and Mission are very closely related…
Every leader must paint a vision — a desired future state. From what I understand, Vision and Mission are very closely related. Interestingly, I think our biggest problem — the thing that may tie it all together — is that we have no national mission. Every successful entity has a mission. Even Young MC tried to define one for you: “You’re on a mission and you’re wishin’ someone could cure your lonely condition.”
Many good Vision statements begin with, “I imagine a world where…” So, here’s mine for the USA:
I imagine a world in which the United States of America has self-actualized.
Allow me to break that down.
Let’s talk the Founding Fathers, Seinfeld, Fight Club, and Maslow.
We Could Be Heroes
Whenever things are going off-track, the best solution seems to be to get back to the basics. So, I actually sat down and read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance. I hadn’t done that since my days at Fairfield High School in Ohio. I even read the inscription under the Statue of Liberty, something I don’t think I’d EVER done. (I looked it up online; I didn’t fly there and take a gander.) I wasn’t familiar with it at all. The only way I even knew it had “wretched refuse” in it was due to the Seinfeld bit.
Interestingly, Seinfeld’s film, “Comedian,” has the tagline, “Where does comedy come from?” We’re all asked where we get our ideas. Fortunately, as a Presidential candidate, I didn’t have to go far to learn (or to remember) what the country was intended to be. It’s all right there in our great documents.
To form a more perfect Union, Establish Justice, Insure domestic Tranquility, Provide for the common defense, Promote the general Welfare, Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, All men are created equal, We are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, With Liberty and Justice for All, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of the People to peaceably assemble, Right to bear arms, Right to be secure in our Persons, Right to a speedy and public trial, Powers not delegated to the government are with the People…
And as a comedian, I guess what I’m saying is that it would be nice to be able to say those things about our country without it all sounding like a joke.
The problem is that I have no idea what we, as a nation, stand for anymore. I know we clearly used to stand for some of these things. That’s reflected in the enormous battles of the 20th Century: World War I, The Great Depression, World War II, Moonshot.
What do we stand for now? The first thing that comes to mind? Consumption.
In some ways, this is a natural evolution of any country, organization, or person. Freedom ebbs and flows. If we use suffrage as our metric, this is easy to see. At our inception, only 21+-year-old property-owning straight white men could vote. This gradually expanded, through the 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 26th Amendments, to include all U.S. citizens equally. But abundance gives way to complacency… complacency becomes apathy… voter turnout drops… power is concentrated once again in the hands of the few… probably mostly 21+-year-old property-owning straight white men.
Indeed, perhaps one of the things Moonshot did was to show the rest of us, quite literally what we knew figuratively: how far above everybody else the white man could rise.
I can almost audibly hear a portion of you sigh, “Really, Raj? Are you gonna engage in identity politics?” No, I’m not. The comedian in me couldn’t resist the metaphor… c’mon, that’s a good joke. The point is that, as amazing an accomplishment as the moon landing was, we need something that is more inclusive and that directly affects all of us. Not that I’m knocking Teflon and Tang.
In many ways, our complacency is understandable. The Powers That Be have charmed us with Bread & Circus.
As Brad Pitt said:
“Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential. And I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh!t we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, men. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
But we CAN be rock stars. We can, as The Killers sang, “turn this thing around.”
The Third Abraham
The Biblical Abraham and Abraham Lincoln have had quite an effect upon our country, given respectively, our primarily Judeo-Christian principles and the 16th President holding this whole thing together. There’s another Abraham I’d like to throw in the mix.
Are you familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? You’ve probably seen the pyramid at some point.
Don’t worry. You don’t need a background in psychology to grasp it. It has five levels. The bottom, or most basic, is Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion. Now, these rights aren’t explicitly stated, but then again, “the right to take a dump” might’ve stood out like a sore thumb on the floor of Congress.
The next level is Safety. Above that is Love & Belonging. Then we come to Esteem. And finally, at the top, is Self-Actualization.
Here’s what I find interesting: this matches up very well with Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And our social strata contain people fighting primarily one of these battles — some are fighting for survival, some are fighting for freedom, and some are fighting for their right to paaaaaaarty.
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the United States was gettin’ its swerve on, we were just trying to get on the map. Get that food, get that water… everybody grinding it out. So, the United States, once it got well past Level One of Maslow for the vast majority of its citizens, got lost on its way to Self-Actualization.
And that’s… also totally understandable. ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL was a radical concept in 1776. This was a new belief; in the Old World, you could get killed for suggesting that a king and a peasant had the same value. Indeed, it was so crazy that we weren’t there four score and seven years later, when Lincoln addressed Gettysburg. Nor were we there 100 years later, when Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. Nor are we there today.
In a way, it’s similar to First and Second Generation immigrants. After about the 20th time of my exclaiming to my parents, “But what is my PURPOSE?” my Mom finally replied, ~“I don’t know. We never went through this. We spent all of our time keeping our head down, working, and putting food on the table. We didn’t have the luxury — or the burden — of trying to answer that question.”
And then it occurred to me: everybody’s battle is difficult. We need to stop demonizing the rich and the poor as takers — the rich as greedy and the poor as entitled. The worst thing you can say to an eight-year-old worried about his cursive quiz is, “Ah, who cares? You’re only eight. It doesn’t matter.” Because the reality is that whatever problem is in front of you here and now is the most difficult. It needs to solved, not judged.
A lot of people in my generation, especially the children of immigrants (and aren’t we all the children of immigrants?), have the first four Maslow levels on-lock. It has been well-documented how high the self-esteem is of the Millennials. (I’ll tackle the fallacy of this in a future post.) But Self-Actualization is rough, man. It is not politically correct for us to say that we have it as difficult as our parents. After all, they worked extremely hard. But we should not deny that our own struggle of trying to define why we’re even here — how we want to not only do well but do good — is a real one. Pain is relative — let’s not compare ourselves but rather accept that everybody’s path contains obstacles.
Mission: Possible
We hear a lot about American Exceptionalism — our freedom, our egalitarianism, our democracy. Well, this is exactly what it is: the United States is a place where one can self-actualize. Sure, you can do so in other countries, but it’s harder. The USA is best positioned to allow a person to do it. Why? Because most of the countries in the East place the Society over the Individual. Not here. In the West, it’s the other way around. And specifically in America, because it is a social experiment, because it is the only country to have been invented, because “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,” anyone can come here and take a page out of the Army playbook: Be All You Can Be.
As such, the USA itself should self-actualize. It doesn’t need to ask its Mommy what it should be when it grows up. Britain doesn’t know. The answer, again, is in our original texts. It needs to adopt as its mission the idea that we are the one place on Earth that can nurture individuals at every level of the Maslow Pyramid. The people at the bottom need to eat. The people at the top have to find their way. And everybody in the middle has to be taken care of, too.
Let me be clear on this point: not all of this is the role of the government. I am merely defining the problem. I’m not necessarily saying government is the solution. (More on that later.)
And by the USA itself defining a national mission, we can all feel energized, enrolled, and engaged in making it happen.
Let’s make the United States a land where we:
Enable everybody to succeed, no matter where s/he may be on the Maslow Pyramid.
Bring Production and Consumption back into balance.
Establish true capitalism for as many as possible.
And then maybe we can place a Fresh quote on the Statue of Liberty:
For all of y’all keepin’ y’all in health
Just to see you smile and enjoy yourself
’Cause it’s cool when you cause a cozy condition
That we create, ’cause that’s our mission.
Now, that’d be Slick.
#raj4prez