Tom, I’m glad you’re dealing with some important ideas like this in light of servant leadership. You said that,
“It could be that the news media tends to dwell on the negative stories, or it could be that these stories highlight the symptoms that are telling us we need to change our ways. I tend to believe the second option.”
One idea I urge you also to consider is that both your points might be right. We servant leaders should not let the media’s focus on the negative overly frighten us, but we shouldn’t get complacent. Many things go right, but let’s keep fixing things that go wrong.
You note a number of things going wrong. What’s going right?
Thanks for giving me the excuse to share two articles from two great contemporary writer/thinkers in the last few years have influenced me:
Steve Pinker from his 2007 The New Republic article “The History of Violence”:
“On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century…the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots….”
http://www.edge.org/documents/
ar...206.html#pinker
David Brooks from New York Times 2005 essay “Virtue of Virtues”
“…To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors….”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/0...n/
07brooks.html
Chris,
Thanks for the reminder for the need to look at both sides, the right and the wrong, or perhaps maybe more importantly to simply be aware of what is and let go of the labels right and wrong. So I will try and keep the focus on more of an inventory of where we are at. But since this is about servant leadership, there will be a focus on what is the impact on the "least privileged in society", because according to Greenleaf, that is the best test of servant leadership.
Tom
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