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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday February 17, 2003 Volume V Number 7 |
FOCUS - Kitchen Cabinets
As the talk of war heats up, and the voices of protest clamor for the media spotlight, once again the old maxim prevails. The only real certainty in life is uncertainty. Not even duct tape can hold it all together.
It feels like the whole world is on hold. On the brink of something momentous. Waiting for some resolution. The outcome is impossible to predict. But there is one place where steely resolve remains unchanged. It’s on the face of our President.
Some liken this resolve to the cowboy caricature of the ugly American, six gun strapped to his waist in a tough leather holster, rawhide chaps, spitting chaw in defiance, from under a broad rimmed hat providing shade from a relentless sun, gritty, sweaty eyes that say, “Someone’s gotta get the heck out of Dodge City, and it ain’t gunna be me.”
This dusty Western movie metaphor may enable some to discount the meaning and purpose of the focus of the leader of the free world, to toss aside the seriousness of the hour with a cheap shot at the President who hails from the Lone Star State, but they are missing the point. Entirely.
My brother sat in the front row this week of a major conference of broadcasters in Washington DC for their annual gathering. When Mr. Bush’s staff booked a session for the President to address the attendees, he knew it would be a supportive crowd. Security was unprecedented, and the whole assembly waited patiently during a week of high tension, high stakes confrontations, as a build-up of our armed forces continued in the Middle East. The dictator of Iraq remained obstinate, the global village over there at the United Nations enjoying a rare moment of international influence elevated this week way above previous decades. Until now, glittering formalities played out without real consequence in vague obscurity, nations longing for a time long past when their opinions held sway in the international community. It’s been a long long time since the world listened to France or Germany. For them, this is an Andy Warhol fifteen minutes.
It was a long wait, but the President finally arrived to a full house at the world’s largest hotel and conference center in the heart of the nation’s Capital. Since my brother is a member in good standing on the board of directors of the sponsoring group, he took his place in the front row of the large auditorium along with some old friends in the business, and his wife, Lori. They listened as the President addressed the crowd and once more made his case that time is up for the despot of Baghdad, and generally, this audience seemed to approve.
What took Roger by complete surprise was the moment that followed the speech. The crowd, wishing to contribute to the President’s sense of mission, stood to their feet in a stirring ovation, did not let up the volume of whistles and applause and cheers. A loud and long expression of enthusiastic support rose up as the Commander in Chief took a few moments to work the crowd, just a few along the front row, and Roger realized that Mr. Bush was walking directly towards them - taking Lori’s hand and thanking her for being there, and then turning directly to Roger and with laser beam focus, engaged my brother with a genuine smile, locking eyes and gripping with a firm and warm handshake, thanking him as well. As Roger relayed the story to me, I asked, “Buddy… what did you say?”
My brother, like the President, a natural born political animal himself, came up with words that frankly, spoke for me and maybe you, too.
Holding that eye contact as long as he could get it, Roger smiled back, returning the firm handshake and said, “Mr. President, we love you. We believe in you, and we are all praying for you regularly.” It was the twinkle in the eye and the nod of thanks that said, “Thank you. I need people like you. Your prayers make you part of the process. We need God’s wisdom. These are weighty matters. We are in it together.” All that said to my brother in a single nod.
They once called it the Bush smirk – in clear derision then of a Presidential wannabe. Now they call it resolve. Confidence. Determination. Leadership.
My brother Roger is accustomed to wandering around rooms filled with influential people. But this one will live long in the memory book.
It came in the middle of a week when the world was spinning in the vortex of history-making.
* * * * * * *
When Paul Newman took the part of Lucas Jackson, from a novel based on the true story of an ex-convict, he was building on the anti-hero characters that made him a favorite in the Nineteen Sixties. The Hustler and then Hud prepared him for a role that would influence a generation. He became Cool Hand Luke.
When Luke was arrested for the first time in Stockton, California (the film’s location), and sentenced to two year’s hard labor in a Southern prison, it seemed a minor infraction. Luke was bored and drunk, and late one night, he set out on a lone mission to destroy parking meters. With a pipe cutter, he severed the meters from their pipe stands. While you might think initially that he was after the cold cash contained in the little machines, you would be mistaken. Luke didn’t even try to open the little cash boxes. He left them laying in the gutter while he cut more, maybe twenty or thirty in the downtown square. Until at last, a pair of officers on late night patrol found him at the crime scene, barely conscious, indifferent, hardly aware of the crimes he was committing, and submitted without any resistance to his arrest.
You might be puzzled by his reaction to getting caught. He simply smiled. As though his real mission was not to vandalize or to steal money, but rather, to be incarcerated.
To Luke, prison life was a fate. Not a punishment.
In fact, while there, he made several escapes. The escapes didn’t really give him the freedom you might think he craved. It instead, gave him the satisfaction of knowing the weakness of the system that held him captive. Each time he escaped, he set himself up for re-capture. His new friends in the prison admired his ability to escape, but welcomed him back as a long lost part of the family each time he was re-arrested and brought back with a corresponding extension of his sentence.
The story of Luke’s life
was the story of his influence on the other prisoners. At first he seemed
aloof, indifferent. But in time, his view of life, his detachment from the
realities of the establishment, his ability to be unaffected by the cruel fate
of prison life; well he brought new perspective to them all, especially the
oversized bruiser who dominated the jail – a convict they called Dragline
(George Kennedy).
In the end, when Luke is finally shot and killed by a prison guard, he dies smiling, as though he knows he’s lived out his fate. Even in death, he remained unbowed, unbent. Luke is Cool Hand Luke, in the end, he beat the system by refusing to participate in it.
The film was produced in 1967, just as the student protest movement gathered momentum on college and university campuses across America. The following year, the Vietnam War took a turn for the worse, and thousands of American soldiers died in a cause few people understood. There were assassinations (Martin Luther King) and Bobby Kennedy, and the Democratic National Convention exploded in rage and violence in the streets of Chicago.
Cool Hand Luke set the pace. The Establishment was dangerous. It dehumanized people. It suffocated individuality. It sent good people to war in an unjust cause.
These days, the culture of anti-war is making something of a come-back. The rhetoric and the sentiment seems vaguely and strangely familiar to a period in our history that has turned yellow with age.
But the differences are stark. In 1968, the “enemy” was far away, and the cause unclear. The threat of communism got muddy. Somehow lost in the swamps of Southeast Asia.
Today, terrorists hide in caves and in the shadows. But we have seen the results of their scheming. We know the power of their capacity to destroy. We listen to the hatred that energizes their troops.
It’s a time for courage. Our troops are disciplined, alert, skilled, and ready.
All we need is the collective will to take care of business.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Cool Hand Luke may have been a hero to one generation, but not this one. We can’t afford the detachment anymore. We have a role to play in the total scheme of things. We are connected.
We spent the day on Saturday installing a new kitchen in Mom’s place. The demolition crew arrived early, and by mid-afternoon, new cabinetry and drawers and wall covering and plumbing were assembled and by late evening, put in place. It was a family project, all of us planning and measuring and inspecting and problem-solving and decision-making in ways we rarely do, and when the day was over and our energy spent, we stepped back and examined our work and the benefit of the project was summarized in our mother’s smile.
Leaders imagine good things and then articulate a vision. Others join in the imagining, and then join in the process of giving life to the vision.
There is work to do. On a national and international level. We are all anxious for resolution in our international crisis.
But there is work to do at home, too.
Today, on this holiday Monday morning, shun the detachment of Cool Hand Luke. Take on the more contemporary view, the kind of leadership my brother saw from close range in a large auditorium in Washington DC, a leadership of commitment and involvement and steely determination and resolve.
Take the cue.
And watch what will happen in your world.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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