Last Night....

Last night I cried. I cried as I did when I buried my best friend at Arlington – dead from the ravages of Agent Orange, I cried as I did when I learned that most of my boot camp platoon was KIA/WIA at Hue City, I cried because that which I love has been severely wounded. But I realized that wounded was not killed, that here, as well as in other pockets, there are patriots and leaders still willing to go forward in the face of overwhelming odds to carry the flag forward. In the parlance of my orders there was always the last specification in the mission statement “Failure is not a mission parameter”. I do not intend to go quietly in the dark, if this be the era of America In Exile, then I shall be the Force Resistance.

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic, that they can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty. The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”

Then there are the appropriate words of Thomas Paine in Common Sense: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

We did not arrive at this point overnight. The Republican Party in its present form has reaped the seeds that it has sown, and unless it changes philosophy/direction, it will follow other political parties into the dust of obscurity. The solution will neither be easy nor in the short term. All incumbent political parties (with the exception of the Carter presidency) enjoy a two term presidency, we have the 2014 elections, then the 2016 ahead. I do not advocate anarchy, but rather change from within the framework of the Constitution. The web service Mega Vote provides a means of tracking, via email, how your Senators and Congressmen vote on anything before the House or Senate. Write or contact your Senators and Congressmen, all of them have a web page with a ‘Contact Me’ for or a hyper-linked email address. You won’t get a personal reply; you’ll get a boilerplate response. I was on staff for a General Manager, and was tasked with handling customer complaints – the man in the corner office didn’t read or resolve the complaints, that’s what he paid me to do…but, we categorized them and provided complaint analysis so that trends could be identified, investigated and resolved. Trust me – every Senator or Congressman has a staff person who is tasked with cataloging the subject and concern and providing Senator Foghorn Leghorn with a summary of things he needs to be interested in.

The powers that be have concluded that they have lost the non-white and ‘millennial’ vote, and they are scrambling around in a panic of how to overcome that deficiency. Frank Luntz had a focus group after the election on how the party could improve their message, and I think the answers were almost pretty obvious. As one who spent a great number of years in the customer contact side and trained many CSR’s, I always had one point that I hammered into their heads – it wasn’t in the corporate training manual until many years later, but it was ‘Listen to what the customer is saying – do not preconceive, prejudge, or dismiss their concern, but listen, repeat the problem/question back so that they feel that you are concerned, then become the single point of contact (even if you must pass it off to another group – don't shuffle the customer around, become that person's solution). Where the campaign guru's failed in the second debate was on the first question when the man asked him about a job – Romney didn’t come back with what kind of a job were the looking for, what qualifications they had, didn't 'personalize' the man, he launched into his talking points. Later after the debate that man was asked about how he felt and while his answer on camera was non-committal, it was obvious Romney didn’t sway him.

In closing, to quote Benjamin Franklin again, when asked what kind of government the convention had decided on, his reply was “A Republic, if you can keep it” – I intend to keep it.