Leadership & Strategy | IT and Business Transformation | Global Sustainability
#politics #unitedstates In his Inaugural Address in 1961, JKF uttered the famous line “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” preparing Americans for the escalating Cold War tensions with the former Soviet Union, and more broadly in other programs such as JFK’s Peace Corps. The generation of George H.W. Bush, Joe Kennedy Jr, JFK’s older brother who had died in World War II with the ambition to become president which accidentally fell on JFK, and JFK himself had all served in combat. This call to public service in the US military worked until Vietnam which met with domestic turmoil after JFK’s assassination and later in Afghanistan and Iraq despite abjectly poor civilian leadership by elected officials in these wars in response to 9/11 over more than 20 years. Now the United States is once again being prepared for another long war on multiple fronts with barely any respite, to fight for freedom around the world, in what could be another world war, gratuitous if not stopped, possibly more destructive than any which came before in human history. Today’s political class, unlike JFK’s generation, call the citizenry for public service because they are failing to do their jobs. When this happens it is in the American character to resist the failure of political leadership as during Vietnam whether that was Bill Clinton who avoided the draft as a conscientious objector or Colin Powell and John Kerry who took the leadership to task by excoriating them from within. The Constitution of the United States specifically gives government officials in the three branches of government the responsibility for public service by their own volition. It is their tax payer paid avocation, not that of the rest of the citizens who have their own private lives to live. They cannot and should not arouse the American people to public service when they are failing to do what they are being paid by the citizenry to do. If I or any American wish to do public service as a voluntary choice, the process in the structure of our government is to get elected or appointed in the three branches of US government and do that job responsibly, otherwise lead private lives. The responsibility of the present political class, therefore, is to stop the wars, not act on them as foregone conclusions, because humanity knows better. It is common sense that living is always better than dying to do something for yourself, your family, and your country.
