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Saturday, December 31, 2005
For Saturday, December 31, 2005 and Sunday, January 1, 2006
Jefferson had the liberation of the colonies. Gandhi had the liberation of India. Martin Luther King had the liberation of African Americans. What is the great cause of our time and why have we been unable to define it? Perhaps it is because we are called upon to embrace a cause larger than all those that have come before us. Perhaps its magnitude obscures it from us - it is so large that it has not dawned on us that that could be it.
Perhaps we were given the examples of Gandhi and Jefferson and King that we might have the stomach for that which our age asks of us. Perhaps they lived that we might see that the essence of self actualization, and indeed of human morality - is the achievement of that which is clearly and utterly impossible.
I read a piece by Howard Zinn today in which he said that it may be time for us to end "our addiction to massive violence," and not just to end the war in Iraq, but to end war itself.
Perhaps the achievement which is asked of us is larger even than that. Maybe Einstein introduced us to the impossible mountain we would be asked to climb when he began speaking about the need to establish a world government.
We have to ask ourselves, what in this day and age, wherein the United States is not some far-off dream yet to be realized, but is actually the most powerful nation on earth, with a 230 year history behind it, would be the equivalent of Jefferson believing that he and a few of his companions could remake the world by creating the United States of America? What would be as impossible today as that was then, and every bit as visionary? To what great task of this age does the great task to which the Founders responded call upon us?
Our responsibility is not to build monuments to those who dared to dream the greatest dreams of all time and then kick back our heels. Our responsibility is to make something great of the great investment they made in us.
What lies ahead of us may frighten us to our very core. But what we ought really to be afraid of is to say no to a destiny that was being written for us centuries before we were ever born.
Happy New Year. May 2006 be the beginning not just of a great new year, but of a great new era in human history, and may we be full participants in making it so.
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Friday, December 30, 2005
NASA and Charity
Larry Roshfeld, one of our readers made a great point the other day. He said, with respect to my comment about charities being unable to get the best and the brightest for a $350,000 a year salary, that, "I wonder if the NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo project were as well paid as their private sector counterparts? I would doubt it. And I would also doubt that there were any less talented than those better-paid engineers who didn't work for NASA."
I think Larry is probably right, but, it's not an apples to apples comparison because of another difference between charity and the for-profit, or, in the case of NASA, government sector. Stay with me here. NASA was able to attract the best and the brightest WITHOUT paying salaries competitive with industry because NASA was attempting to do something that had never been done before in the world. They were going for, arguably, the boldest, most audacious goal in the history of mankind. The sheer guts, idealism, and dreaminess of it attracted the best and the brightest. Who wouldn't want to work on that?
But we don't allow charities to go for bold and audacious goals. In fact, it is strictly prohibited. How can I say such a thing? Because it is a fact that we don't allow charities to make a mistake. We judge charities exclusively by one measure - their short term "efficiency" - in fact, their annual "efficiency" - that is, the percentage of dollars that goes to "the cause" as opposed to "overhead." Everyone uses this measure - the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator, the media, the states' attorneys general - you name it - the percentage that goes to "the cause" is God. It is idolized beyond all rationality. Any mistake - the slightest fluctuation in plans - will cause that short-term measure to spike - and no charity believes it can afford the fallout from their donors or the media in the case of such an event.
A quick example. A charity that raises $5 million a year and has a 20% overhead ($1 million) decides it's going to try a $1 million bold and daring ad campaign to double its donations. It fails. No extra money gets raised. So now overhead just went from $1 million to $1 million plus the $1 million in failed ad dollars, or $2 million - 40% overhead. Scandal ensues.
So the dynamic that allowed NASA to attract the best engineers in the nation is off-limits to charity. It's not off-limits to, say, the movie industry. The movie industry can make a $100 million flop and no one really cares, but make a $100 million mistake in charity and you wouldn't be able to count the indictments.
Couple the inability to compete in the salary domain with the inherently cautious, suffocating no-mistakes-ever environment in the non-profit sector - which kills the very idealism that offers people non-monetary incentives to enter the sector - and you have to wonder how the sector attracts anyone at all.
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Thursday, December 29, 2005
Bruce and God
I once heard a minister say, after 9-11, that when we are broken we are closest to God. I've been listening to this Springsteen album of a show he did in Milan, and watching the DVD of the making of the "Born to Run" album. Bruce has this rare ability to break your heart with his words. "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?" "Talk about a dream, try to make it real, you wake up in the night with a fear so real, you'll spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come..." "There's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor, I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm, gonna be a twister to blow everything down, that ain't got the faith to stand its ground, blow away the dreams that tear you apart, blow away the dreams that break your heart, blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted."
We have this common sense of the preciousness of our lives and time here on earth, and this common preciousness in the form of our fragile dreams - some that we have let go of, and some that have managed to survive. We have this common fear that even the ones that have managed to survive will never be realized. We all hope that our lives will matter - that this opportunity will not be squandered - that we will not be forgotten by God, left at the end of our lives with all of this unspent potential - all of these unsung songs. Human beings are dreammakers, and to have our dreams unmade, is, I believe, the thing that saddens and frightens us most. This aching is what connects us all. It is such a beautiful, tender thing. If we could all see just that in one another, and join together in the great effort of making our dreams come true - of supporting one another toward that end - instead of tearing one another down - oh what a beautiful beautiful world this would be.
Bruce helps me remember that I am not alone in the anxiety and fear that my own dreams will be left unrealized. He helps me to remember that this is the human condition in these times. And so he helps me to remember that I am not alone in my humanity, and this brings me closer to everyone else on the planet, which, for me anyway, is the experience of being brought closer to God.
So when you feel that your dreams may never come true, know that you have tapped into the great aching of humanity, and that you are not alone - that you are, in fact, closer to the unity that is God than when you are oblivious to that aching. Relish in the aching - in the human condition - and know that your aching is not only humanity's, but that it is God's.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Perilous Thinking
More on the topic from yesterday. Think about how the system has trained you to think about people who make money in charity. Think about how you have been trained to think about someone who makes a million dollars a year in charity. Scandal, right? I remember being interviewed on NPR one day about four years ago and some AIDS activist called in from Florida - someone who didn't even know me, had obviously believed anything he had read in the paper about me, or heard through some gossip network, and started calling me an AIDS profiteer. He actually said, "I can't wait until they put you in jail."
For what? For raising $100 million for people with AIDS in less than eight years?
This is the kind of garbage I had to put up with for most of my time at Pallotta TeamWorks, and the more money we raised the louder the volume got. It's like if we had been failing, no one would have cared, but the more we succeeded the more they were sure there had to be something fishy going on. I can say this because now a lot of people are failing at the very same thing we did, and no one raises a question or a concern.
One of the more absurd things I ever read on this whole topic was by a consultant from the mid-west. His comment typifies how we have been trained to think about this subject. He said that he felt that if a charity paid any of their top executives more than $350,000 the IRS should consider revoking their tax-exempt status. He said that he realized that you get what you pay for, but you ought to be able to get the best of the best for $350,000.
That's just a stupid and irresponsible comment. You couldn't get Steve Jobs for $350,000. In fact, you couldn't get him for ten times that. Your probably couldn't get him for 100 times that. You couldn't get Bill Gates for that. You couldn't get Richard Branson for that. You couldn't get Phil Knight, the head of Nike, for that. Where on earth does someone come off saying that the best and the brightest can be had in charity for $350,000 a year when tens of thousands of the best and the brightest are earning millions of dollars more than that in the for-profit sector? There are over six million millionaires in the United States. You couldn't buy most of them for $350,000 either.
The way we have been trained to think about paying people to help solve the great social problems of our time is a danger to the poor and the needy. It is killing people, even while those who spew it sit on high horses surveying the dead. The people who cling to this self-righteous thinking are the ones who ought to go to jail, because they are standing in the way of progress and rescue. This thinking is obsolete. Broken. Ridiculous. Asinine. Morally luxurious. And it is perilous. It has to be rejected, removed, and replaced with intelligent, rational, enlightened thought, not based on feelings and misplaced morality, but on data and an intention to produce real results in the world.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Persons of the Year
Time magazine has chosen Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as their "Persons of the Year," in part, the headline says, because "these are not the people you expect to come to the rescue." Which means the people we do expect to come to the rescue are people who are obscure and without means, and have no real power or wealth with which to help the poor. "Rock stars are designed to be shiny...furloughed from reality for all time...Billionaires are even more removed."
It is amazing to me, just amazing to me, that people who want to spend their entire lives working in the charitable domain, and maybe earn a half a million, or, God forbid, a million dollars a year are considered the scum of the earth, while people who spend all of the early years of their lives earning hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for themselves, and then want to spend part of their time later in life doing charitable work are lauded as the saviors of the planet. I have never heard a more fucked up thing in all my life. We create massive economic disencentive for people to provide direct charitable service in the world. We create massive economic incentive for people to do everything else. When people want to use their creativity to do direct charitable service AND earn a robust living for themselves we prevent it, but when people want to make a fortune for themselves - often, in part, at the expense of the poor (I mean who do you think pays the highest percentage of their disposable income for Microsoft Windows 2000 - what kinds of wages do you think people are earning packaging U2 CDs?) we are all for it. It is unbelievable.
Until we allow people even some modest percentage of the kind of incentives they can earn doing direct good for themselves for doing direct good for others, the great problems of the world will persist. Ironically, making these three good folks the "Persons of the Year" only entrenches the very system which prevents us from solving the problems about which they, and we, all care. It gives credence to the idea that only the people who take a vow of poverty are allowed to spend their lives helping the poor. All others will have to wait until they are rich.
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Monday, December 26, 2005
People Make a Difference
Our lives make a difference. The things we do or don't do make a difference. Making a difference is not simply an affirmative action. People make a difference by being passive all the time. In fact, more people affect the nature of our world by being passive than by being active. The problem that humanity faces is that most people think their lives don't matter. So the guy at Home Depot who doesn't care about whether you get your question answered or not thinks he doesn't matter, and he thinks that you don't matter, and therein lies the entire problem. He makes a difference, whether he knows it or not. He frustrates your day, he gives Home Depot a bad name and he destroys the potential for a postitive experience for you and for him by replacing it with a negative one.
All over the world all the time we see how people don't think their lives matter, or that anything much matters. It's why there is litter, bad tech support, cars that don't work, pollution, you name it. Because people don't think their lives matter, and they think that making a difference means transforming civil rights or eradicating hunger, when in fact, it simply means taking responsibility for mylife, and not foresaking the potential that God gave me for mylove affair with your own self hatred.
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Sunday, December 25, 2005
Merry Christmas Everyone
 "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
Gospel of John
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