Two New eBooks at Amazon Kindle!
- Details
- Written by Rex M. Rogers
America needs more than jobs. It needs leadership that truly believes in the innate greatness of America's original ideals and its people. We don't have that on either side of the aisle.
We only have politicians-as-tacticians, people more adept at talking political minutia than vision and destiny. A person who got his or her jollies talking about political processes and various government activities used to be called a “Policy Wonk”—think Bill Clinton. Now, it seems, pols running for office, including the presidency, have all become Policy Wonks, arguing on the stump and in debates about which Republican or Democrat approach to governing is going to—wait for it—“create jobs.” Like that’s going to happen.
Americans need a recaptured sense of who we are and a recast sense of what we’re capable of doing. Not Pollyanna platitudes but, still, some bottled optimism based upon a keen understanding of why life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness produced for decades a culture, country, and economy attracting immigrants from around the globe.
We’ve lost confidence in who we were and who we are. Worse, a lot of Americans, at least media, intellectual, and political elites, don’t believe in who we were.
We have a sluggish economy, but America isn’t so much in an economic crisis as a leadership and hope crisis. We really don’t believe anymore that there can be a “better tomorrow.”
Add to this a crippling debt, which is rooted in our moral decline more than simple economics, and you get our current dilemma. We’re in over our heads and we don’t know what to do next. One thing's certain, though to listen to pols running for President you wouldn't know it: we cannot right the ship without sacrifice. Few wanna-be Presidents are willing to say so.
So, what do we need? America needs leaders with moral character and courage, men and women who believe in what’s best about America so they can help us do what’s best for America. Who will be our Joshua?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
- Details
- Written by Chas
- Details
- Written by Rex M. Rogers
Increasing incidences of violence—or “acting out” as it’s called today—in and around American sports are symptoms of deeper, wider, larger cultural problems. At least it’s difficult not to interpret sports-related violence this way.
And why shouldn’t we do so? High school, college, and professional athletics are not a world unto themselves despite what a few sports celebrities seem to think. Athletics is simply another thing we do in culture, our way of life.
Athletics at its best is a time-honored form of competitive fun, full of human drama, sacrifice, extraordinary effort and resolve even in defeat, sportsmanship and honor. It’s a form of self-expression that taps all human characteristics, including what religion calls sin. Unfortunately, we don’t escape ourselves in sports. The human dilemma still exists. We are both good and evil, so people cheat, lie, and “act out.”
This year’s preseason NFL games were marked by a rising tide of fan violence. August 20, at the San Francisco-Oakland game, fans fought in the stands, two men were shot outside the stadium, a person was beaten in a restroom, and security ejected 70 while police arrested 12—all over a game. We Americans used to look with smirks, smugness, and superiority upon soccer fan behavior worldwide, but no more. We can get into senseless violence just like everyone else. What happened to “family entertainment”?
After the Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup NHL final fans rioted and burned in the streets, embarrassing a city and a sport, even if one known for on-ice fights. At a San Francisco Giants vs LA Dodgers game earlier this year a man was severely beaten. Similar violence has occurred at university and even high school athletic events, including the chanting of vulgar language aimed at opposing players.
Police and others suggest several reasons: alcohol, sold vigorously and consumed in quantity, in the stadium and at pre-game tailgating; higher ticket prices; joblessness; social media making us more aware of incidences that were there all along, and so it goes.
But none of this gets to the core of a generation coming of age with a greater sense of entitlement and fewer learned self-limitations than ever before. Nor does it acknowledge that American culture is becoming more capricious and violent across the board—more “random” mass murderers on university campuses, in malls, at high schools, more public figures enduring threats and employing security, more family violence and “He was such a quiet, nice boy” killers “acting out.”
It sounds too simple or maybe too complex in a philosophic sort of way, but I think it’s true: the generations coming of age in American culture now are a long way from the Greatest Generation in their understanding of individual responsibility, initiative, work ethic, character principles like integrity, willingness to defer gratification or sacrifice, and earn goals, even a willingness to set goals, and most of all, understanding and embracing the difference between right and wrong. Younger generations including to some extent my own Boomers were not taught right and wrong.
So if something isn’t going the way you want, you “act out.” You fight verbally or physically, you simply take what you think is owed, you cheat, you lie. In the worst cases, people respond violently.
I don’t think the answer is more security, better trained and better paid police, or more stringent alcohol policies. Sports venues are trying: at a recent Michigan State University football game the announcer borrowed from airports, telling people "If you see something, say something." I support all these efforts,, but I don't think they will solve the problem. I think the problem is deeper, going to the root of what it means to be a human being first and an American second. We’ve lost our sense of limits, which is to say law and order.
Ironically, limits liberate, at least the right kind of limits do. Limits based upon respect for life, others, and property, for example. Such limits free us to live, work, and pursue happiness. We’ve lost a lot of them, so we do what’s right in our own eyes—a not so good plan.
Government can’t provide a right sense of limits or vision of hope, nor certainly can corporations or athletics. Only we can do this, but we need help. Where, I want to know, are the churches?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
- Details
- Written by Ruth Thomas
- Details
- Written by Rex M. Rogers
It’s happened to me many times, two out of three times this week. A woman sitting near me in the Delta Sky Club Lounge at MSP says, “Are you going to be here for awhile?”
“Yes,” I say. “Could you watch my phone,” she says. Her phone is getting its charge in a nearby receptacle. “Sure,” says me.
She goes away for maybe ten minutes, returns, never looks at me, never says “Thanks,” never says a word. I’m thinking, “What am I? Chopped liver?”
At the doctor’s office recently I notice an older woman coming in a few yards behind me, I wait, hold a door, she says, “Oh, I’m slow,” then after passing through, “Thanks.” At another nearby medical office I’m leaving, I see a young woman, obviously pregnant, walking out behind me. I stutter step to slow down, hold two doors, she glances at me, never says a word and walks on.
I tell these two doctor’s office stories because the 60-something said, “Thanks,” and the 20-something did not. I’m not one to dump on the younger generation, but I see and hear this pattern regularly. In my estimation the younger generation has for the most part lost the art of saying, “Thank you.”
I’ll never forget holding a door in 1981 for a coed entering the University of Cincinnati Student Union behind me. She cussed me for doing so in no uncertain and rather loud terms. She didn’t bother to develop her point of view, but I surmise that in her mind I had somehow violated her feminine liberation by my blatant act of chauvinism. Apparently she felt I had not yet learned that women were more than capable of making it on their own.
But this isn’t just a young person’s thing. I’ve experienced this many times over in professional settings. Sometimes the omission is so glaring it’s astounding. People simply assume you should meet their needs, don’t give it, which is to say you, a second thought, or have never been taught good manners in the first place.
I realize that if I extend kindnesses to others in order to garner “Thank yous,” than there is something wrong with my attitude and actions. But I really don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
I think my Boomer Generation and those who come after us have shed some of our mannerly sensibilities, if we were ever taught them in the first place. While you can find a thousand individual exceptions to this statement, I still think we live in a coarser age. The zeitgeist of the early 21st Century, at least in American culture, is more about Me, the individual, than Others. Add to this a sense of entitlement and you get what we have, a culture that’s lost the art of saying “Thanks.”
I’m certainly not perfect, much less a model. But I’m trying to remember to say “Thanks” more often and certainly when it is deserved, even more when someone has done something for me or mine that, clearly, they did not have to do.
My son-in-law, Joe Drouillard, supports my website, gratis, on his server, at www.jddesignstudio.com. “Thanks, Joe.”
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
- Details
- Written by Rex M. Rogers
The NCAA Division I Board of Directors is meeting this week. That’s 54 university presidents and chancellors and 13 school and athletics conference professionals representing big-time athletics. On tap is an agenda fueled by what for a better way of describing it was a year of collegiate sports characterized as much by cheating and non-compliance as by championships.
Some 13 major violations cases were identified involving multiple sports: Last year, University of Southern California received numerous penalties for violations in its football, men's basketball and women's tennis programs. Football accounted for more cases (55%) than any other sport, followed by men's basketball (45%).
Top of the heap: Ohio State University’s scandal that didn’t have to happen. “If only,” if only last spring Coach Jim Tressel would have reported his players’ rules violations, put them on suspension, and let them and the program take their medicine. Had he done this, rather than covering up for them and for his own behavior, had he done this rather than coaching his team to a bowl championship, OSU wouldn’t be at risk today of losing more than its self-vacated 12-1 season including the bowl win, along with a two-year probation.
The question is, will the NCAA Committee on Infractions, also meeting this week, have the backbone to level more sanctions? If I had to guess, I’d say “No.” It has the authority to do this for the integrity of sport, but it hasn’t up to now at least demonstrated it has the grit to do what’s needed. The Board of Directors could demand sanctions, but this isn’t likely either.
I’m not anti-OSU. I’ve watched OSU football for years, and I was grieved along with a lot of others by Jim Tressel’s outing as a cheater. He’s the one primarily responsible, but OSU Athletics knew more than it is letting on and is too easily tossing Coach Tressel under the bus as its sacrificial lamb. In my book the Athletics Department leadership, which unfortunately is to say the university, must also be held accountable—not for retribution but for responsibility and to try to help set a new standard of expectation and integrity in NCAA Division I nationally. It's not a pretty picture, but in the long run, reform and restored integrity will benefit all of sports.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.