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Heroes, Moral Courage and Civil Discourse: Values andResponsibility in the Public Square
By Dave Livingston. Dave is a management consultant with almost 30 years of experience with analyzing complex business problems and developing solutions and new businesses. He blogs on public affairs at his blog Parts,Systems, Structures and Outcomes ( http://llinlithgow.com/PtW/ ) where he attempts to apply that toolkit to current affairs and public policy.
Several years ago Gen. Peter Pace addressed the graduating class of the Virginia Military Institute, GeorgeMarshall’s alma mater by-the-way. He said, speaking as a decorated combat commander, that speaking up andholding your ground in tense and serious conference rooms where weight decisions were being made took moremoral courage than leading men in combat.Beginning with Memorial Day through July 4
th
and the60
th
Anniversary of D-Day we celebrated the battlefieldheroisms of our veterans, the Greatest Generation, whoknow only won World War II but came home to build ahealthy, happy and prosperous society that made moreprogress than any other in history and did more good forthe rest of the world than any other society. At the timewe spoke the platitudes and waved the flags but did wereally celebrate those veterans for their sacrifices byliving up to the standards they set?When you ask a veteran why they did what they didthey’ll tell you they went for love of country. But theyfought, bled and died for love of their buddies; all tomany of whom were the real heroes left behind in gravesat best. They don’t speak of it often but what they reallysacrificed for was love of another. A true hero issomebody who is willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the betterment of another. Living to those standardsdoesn’t always require displaying courage on the battlefield, as Gen. Pace observes. If often requires living a lifeof ordinariness that is lived with purpose, dedication and integrity.The health of society, the welfare of the Agora, requiresmore citizens that live lives to those standards. As, evenmore, importantly it requires great moral courage andresponsibility on the part of our leaders as well. Moralcourage as a leader is NOT just standing up to lead thecharge up the hill. Instead it involves being willing tomake decisions and take responsibility for theconsequences of those decisions. It also requiresknowing that those decisions might not work out butbeing willing to make the effort to make the best decisionyou can in the circumstances; and then to change, adaptand overcome when circumstances change of thedecision doesn’t work out. To be conceptual for amoment, Values are as important a component of socialhealth as any other factor. In fact one of the mostimportant!A classic example of failure in Public Leadership is the behavior of Robert McNamara and our leadership in theVietnam War. McNamara knew as early as 1967 that the strategy he had put in place was not working but to theend of his term refused to find another option. Whatever you might think of George Bush’s decisions to invade
 
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Iraq when it became clear that his earlier decisions were not working he had the moral courage to find alternativesand to implement them. Despite the criticisms or outright opposition of his own administration and the leadershipof the Pentagon.Now we are faced with a whole host of difficult decisions to arrest, adapt and change the inherited consequencesof three decades of bad decisions and re-invent the Republic. For those changes to be conceived, invented andimplemented requires courage on the part of the citizenry and courage on the part of the leadership. Among allother things it requires a tolerance for the opposition, a willingness to engage in difficult debates and a ferventdedication to civil discourse.Instead all too often what we are getting is pejorative appeals to the worst of our natures, the use of hindbrainlabeling, a lack of constructive contribution to the debate and abandonment, therefore, of the publicresponsibilities of office. The primary responsibility of leaders is to lead and, among many requirements, a primaryone is to present the facts as they are, reasonable and thought out recommendations on how to proceed,convincing explanations as to why those recommendations are the right ones and the establishment andmaintenance of civil discourse.Politics can often be ugly, the sausage-making machine as Otto von Bismarck called it. But jaw-jaw is alwaysbetter than war-war, to paraphrase Churchill. Now, where are our leaders on all sides of the aisle? And where areour citizens who will hold them accountable for the highest standards of public morality? At the end of the day weget the leadership we ask for and deserve. If we would like a civil, tolerant and productive Public Square that’swhat we need to demand.As always each of the essays below is draw from PSSO and the URL address is provided so you can explore theextensive readings provided with each in the blog. To follow-up on any topic of special interest please see thoseresources.
Table of Contents
Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day, Today 3Frontline Lessons Brought Home: Others, Selves and Manners 5Warm Hearts, Clear Heads, Hard Decisions: 2nd Star to the Right 8McNamara's Legacies and Lessons: Beyond Simple Answers 11Sausage Eating Lizards: Sonia, Spooks, Death Panels and the Pope 13Lizard-brains vs the Public Good: Time to Embrace the Suck 17
 
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Reflections & Remembrances: Memorial Day, D-Day, Today
http://llinlithgow.com/PtW/2009/06/reflections_remembrances_memor.html Posted by dblwyo on June 16, 2009Obviously Memorial Day was Memorial Day and we've passedit by without comment but with a lot of thought and reflection.The weekend after was the 65th Anniversary of D-Day inNormandy but we let that one slide as well. Now that waspartly due to poor discipline or lack of energy, technicalproblems (we've been offair for over a week with a fried DSLmodem) but mostly it was caused by a pause for reflection.That reflection was a search for something to share and saybeyond the obvious or trite - not that our gratitudes shouldn'tbe expressed and certainly not that they are not beyond welldeserved. But others said them last year and again this - asthey should for now and forever, amen - and we took our shotat last year as well. In fact we think this composite set of opedcartoons captures things as well as anything does. BtW - onthat last panel and courtesy of our friends at YouTube some of the color film from WW2 and Iwo is now beingshared. Here's a vidclip of theIwo Flag Raising for real and in color. If you haven't been in combat, and I haven't, it's impossible totruly grasp what it means to have your life at risk that way. Letalone constantly, under strains and pressures all the time andwhen somebody's not shooting at you to have no sleep, pooror non-existent food, worn out clothes, to live in the mud andrain. The old joke is that before you volunteer dig a hole in thebackyard, fill it with water, go spend a few days and hire theneighborhood maniac to take a shot at you now and again. Yetthese people do it and they do it our name. Interestinglyenough perhaps the best efforts to convey the chaos, fear,sudden death and general discomfort may be best captured bysome recent Hollywood movies (Saving Private Ryan, WeWere Soldiers, Band of Brothers, others). The scene onOmaha Beech from Private Ryan is one of the best, along withthe D-Day jumps from Band of Brothers. Take a minute and refresh your memory. I've been in situations wheremy life or well-being was at risk, and multiple times. But never multiple times a minute or over multiple days in arow. If you haven't been there it's almost impossible to imagine. To the extent it can be conveyed by re-telling thestory, and remembering that these calm and quiet recountings are in the hell here are some other heroes:
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Corpman G.E. Whalen, MOH, Iwo;Tibor Rubin, concentration camp survivor and Korean infantryman
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Sgt. Hoxie, wounded and crippled Iraq veteran;JamesLockhard, civilian engineer and posthumous honoree
Going in Harm's Way
These veterans pay a terrible price, though as they all pointout, not as high as the real heroes they left behind. Why dothey do it? Well for some it's an escape, for others anadventure or a chance to make something of themselves.Sometimes it's even from boredom...at least at the start. Butthat's really two questions - both of them deep and profound
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