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Identify Your Piece of the Mess

Authored by Christiane Montuori on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 11:22 PM | Add the first comment!
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In a small way, the assassination attempt in Arizona hit home to me personally.

Gabby Giffords is a friend of mine. She’s been a “student” of mine, twice. I have supported her campaigns financially. It is hard to stop thinking about her lying in that hospital bed.

I shared some feelings about the situation on Facebook the morning after the event and my brief post produced a considerable stream of comments, what the Facebook folks call a thread.

Two themes surfaced in the comments, somewhat at odds with each other:
(1) don’t rush to make judgments about broader, deeper responsibility for the tragedy; and
(2) I have a culprit.

Each of us is part of the system, part of the community that created the current reality that resulted in those horrible few moments at that Safeway northwest of Tucson. 

Hyperbolic politicians and the media and gun laws may all have contributed, and we can happily engage in public debate about how we are going to “fix” them. 

But the only variable over which we can reasonably assume to have some control is our own behavior.

What have you done or not done, said or not said, that contributed to an atmosphere in which Jared Lee Loughner was apparently moved to plan Giffords’ assassination?  What campaigns have you declined to contribute to, and which ones have you supported? What incendiary language have you used in criticizing people or positions different than yours? How have you fed your own need for affirmation in a way that adds to the polarization in our society?

The law will deal with Loughner.

But I worry that what will happen next is lots of heated public debate (it has already begun) about which of the indirect contributions to the tragedy in Arizona is most responsible. There will be too much policy angst and too little changes in behavior including, of course, lowering the vitriol in the debate.

What will you do differently so that in your own way your will try to change the current reality?

The only way that deep change can take place is if each of us does something different tomorrow than we did yesterday.  Rather than continuing to rail against your favorite bogeyman or bogeywoman, figure out what you can do that might curb their excesses.

For me, I am going to put my money and my mouth behind more people who behave responsibly, people who my mentor Elliot Richardson called “radical moderates” in a wonderful book he wrote shortly before he died.  The moderation refers to centrist ideology, but also to a way of being in the world:  passionate but not vitriolic; an awareness of the complexity of the issues ahead and the challenges we face; acknowledge the legitimacy of other points of view; and the courage to resist the pressure to support simplistic, short-term steps that please constituents and avoid the tougher choices. There a bunch of not very interesting “radical moderate” websites out there, but I did find one that seems to capture some of what Richardson was saying. 

The money part is easy. I will double my campaign contributions from here on out, looking for candidates from both parties and across the ideological spectrum who embody that way of being in the world.

Second, the words. Late this spring, I will begin a column on leadership for State Legislatures Magazine. I will look for and publicize legislators who exercise leadership in this way. I will continue to post on the Washington Post’s On Leadership blog, and here, on the Cambridge Leadership Associates website, stressing those values.  And I will push forward in writing the book I have been working on for, well, too long to mention, about understanding and navigating the politics of everyday life. 

Third, I will try in the internal dynamics of our firm and in my work with clients to be less strident in advancing my own views and more sensitive to the risk of driving people to the margins by my own behavior. 

It’s a start.

How about you? 

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