Excerpt #5 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
We have been selfishly cultivating our personal interests and find ourselves at odds with one another.
Our narrow-minded partisanship has our energies focused on each other’s throats, rather than on the issues where they belong.
As a consequence, we have obstructed our potential and badly eroded our promise.
Puzzled, we suspect that greater opportunities are slipping away as we experience a very real, but gradual, inexplicable, loss of a certain togetherness, a certain purposefulness.
We wonder what has gone wrong, and question whether this troublesome momentum can be arrested.
Can it even be defined?
Can its cause be ascertained?
Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention, after four laborious weeks and no agreement upon even a single sentence of the Constitution, expressed grave concern:
“…we shall be divided by our little partial, local interests, our project will be confounded and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages, and what is worse, mankind
may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance despair of establishing government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest.”
As a consequence of Franklin’s remarks, the tide of affairs turned, and the Constitution of the United States found its way into the world.
Today, we find ourselves at many impasses not at all unlike the deadlock which Franklin faced.
Suffering under the weight of parochial interests, we dangle vulnerably as we stubbornly swing ourselves from one extreme to the other.
True, we have achieved some great strides, frequently even exhibiting brilliance in widely varied fields of endeavor.
But when assessing the whole picture, our accomplishments appear as mere highlights against an ominous backdrop of real and potential chaos in many forms.
One can comfortably conclude that we are nowhere near fulfilling our potential.