As I write to you tonight, on January 19, 2009, the nation is atwitter. Barack Obama’s approval ratings are at an all-time high as even some of those who were against him are now for him, and for what he now symbolizes to us… hope.
Tomorrow, we likely will hear him challenge us to increase our personal responsibility. That is a theme that resonates down deep to the root of your heritage as an American, for had not our forebears exercised it there would be no United States of America.
What I wonder is this. What is personal responsibility? Do I even know what that means? Or is it merely a phrase that stirs the fibers of my being and yet means naught because I do not know how to translate it into the actions of my mind, emotions, tongue, hands and feet?
Do you know what personal responsibility is? If not, if you don't define it for yourself, how will you meet his call? And, if you do believe you know, what would those who know you tell me, particularly those you have wronged? I am challenging you because I am challenging my self.
I ask these questions because we are in a mess. The mess is the sum total of decades of lack of personal responsibility by every single one of us in a country whose cornerstone was personal responsibility. And Barack Obama is going to ask you and I to accept personal responsibility tomorrow.
Are we ready for that, I wonder? Willing? Able?
Will I become more personally responsible, I wonder? Or will I nod up and down enthusiastically in a country with my countrymen who feel it in the bones but have not found pause even though we are in a mess, pause for each of us to inventory in what ways our personal responsibility is lacking?
All this has me asking one very basic question. What I believe is the right question.
“What is personal responsibility and In what ways have I not yet accepted it?”
That is a carefully phrased question. I didn’t ask whether I have accepted full personal responsibility. I know I have not. And it is extremely likely you have not either. For the big, fat, honkin’ mirror right in front of our individual faces is a collective mirror of a country that has not. That is the inconvenient truth.
And while some may have accepted more than others, what does that matter when everyone uses the fact that some are less responsible than they as an excuse to delay becoming even more responsible? Where you have not accepted it—where I have not accepted it—that is where the weakness lies and our greatest potential slumbers in the shadows. Goethe said that if we would but each sweep in front of our own doors the whole world would be clean.
Further, if you want to accept personal responsibility, I’d encourage you to not turn over your power, your responsibility, your will-to-good and your responsibility to act to our new president. That is not what he needs, what we need nor will that work. In this times of “outsourcing”, this is the last frontier. You cannot outsource personal responsibility. Nor can I. Freedom is not free.
So, for myself I have a very simple prescription. First, identify in what ways I have not fully accepted personal responsibility. Second, as my act of service to humanity, shore up those areas in my self, my life and relationships. Shine the light in those dark spaces, Transmute them through action. Third, both support and hold our new president accountable. Hope ushers in fools, and the times don’t favor that.
And as the inauguration happens, realize that you and I are being inaugurated too, and that has consequences and repercussions of great import that are simply unknowable as we peer down a very long road. Is it a road of return, a return to prosperity and good times? I don’t think so, the imbalances now reverberating from those so-called good times are too great. We became more materially prosperous than spiritually rich and on so many levels we have taken more than we have given. Therefore, we cannot retrace our steps, we cannot find solace there, in a return down a road that led to imbalance in the first place.
No, this road you and I and our fellow Americans now must walk isn’t a road of return. It is a road to a level of consciousness in which both corruption and idealism burn just as brightly as the other in an inferno fired by courage, love, goodwill and right action.
Personal responsibility is what is required to both create the conditions for those new times, and to prepare, purify and fortify us for that journey. A journey where every man, woman and child must be a leader in order to support one. This is the new leadership, where a leader and supporters are true equals in all respects except that their respective activities are different due to an agreement as to who will do what. An agreement that can be revoked by anyone, because everyone has power.
And you and I.
