If all You have is a Hammer… Everything looks like a Nail

COMMENTARY by Steven K. Haught, Editor

If you’ve been paying attention to the news of the past two weeks, then you know what’s been happening across the country and a fascinating situation that developed in Seattle.  

Protestors and so-called anarchists seized a six block section of downtown Seattle and declared it to be an autonomous zone.  Police withdrew and left the area to be controlled by the Black Lives Matters protestors.

While that certainly is news and unusual, what really stands out is what was said about the police.  An Ethiopian immigrant said… “If there is no police, there is no problem.”  The protestors even renamed the police station… “the Seattle People Department.”

A Seattle church pastor said… “It’s a re-imagination of what it looks like for a neighborhood to really look after itself.”

This may not happen in every city, but in Seattle, it seems clear that people are afraid of the police.  People of all colors are uptight and uncomfortable when their behavior is under the watchful eyes of men and women who carry a gun and a club. 

I am a white male, over the age of 65, living in a comfortable neighborhood in a suburban area of a large city in the eastern U.S..  I am afraid of the police. Can’t remember when I was not apprehensive at the thought of any interaction with cops. I have never been a law-breaker, but I still avoid them as best I can.  Why is my feeling so prevalent in America today, regardless of color?

It goes back many years, at least 40 to 50 years ago, when most of the policing policies and strategies were born and taught at police academies across the country.

It was declared by more than one president of that era that America was going to be a nation of law[s] and order.  Born of that political vision, and the experiences of suppressing the riots of the late 1960s, cops began exhibiting aggressive actions and tactics against any signs of disorder.  The strategy was simple… ‘broken window’— send an armed white male to solve the problem.  

Cops approached the community with a ‘zero tolerance’ for minor crimes, magnified by ‘protective policing’ exhibiting relentless, aggressive and frequently violent forms of enforcement. 

For communities most affected by these tactics, it came to be seen that policing consists of stopping, frisking, clubbing, cuffing and arresting people of color in large and growing numbers.  This of course has led to increasing prison populations, often characterized by excessive sentences for minor to trivial infractions of laws unevenly applied.  The result?  Look around America… you can see the simmering anger and hatred for the police and law enforcement policies.

American cities deploy their police forces as though they are an ‘all-purpose social-worker team’ who can solve any problem with tools and tactics more appropriate for the battlefield.

People with no place to sleep?  Send the cops.  Someone suffering from mental illness and acting erratically?  Send the cops.  Trouble with drugs?  Send the cops.  And it goes well beyond those things.  Loose dogs, loud neighbors, and young bored teens just hanging out in a public place where they’re not welcome… ALL get a harsh dose of the cops.

Every societal failure is put off on the police to solve.  Policing was never meant to solve all the problems they are currently tasked to handle.  They are neither equipped properly, nor are they trained to handle with sensitivity the problems they are asked to resolve.

The problems police are called upon to handle, requires a set of skills mostly foreign to the ‘type’ of person who pursues a career in law enforcement.  They need a wide range of skills that they simply do not have.  They are trained to manage ALL problems with a rigid and if necessary brut force approach to maintaining ‘law and order.’

What about ‘mediation skills’ helping people grapple with that could lead to violence?  Social work skills are essential in the inner-city areas of every major city in America.  Most cops are not equipped to handle situations of homelessness. They lack the ability to diagnose substance abuse or mental illness or know how to intervene carefully in a dysfunctional relationship teetering on the brink of violence.

I hope you don’t think America could exist without policing in its communities.  We cannot, and defunding the police is more a cry of frustration and anger, than a useful and meaningful solution to a systemic problem.

So what can be done to help police be more effective in working with the communities they serve?  It has to start with tearing down the “macho attitude” associated with becoming a cop.  The police academies and academic institutions that teach law enforcement have to drastically revise curriculums to meet the needs of the community.  

The old saying… “if all you have is hammer, everything looks like a nail” is in fact the prevailing attitude of most cops, especially when dealing with what they have been taught to believe—that ‘people of color’ cause the most problems and commit the most crimes. Deal with them harshly if necessary, and it always seems like they live up to that mindset perfectly.  The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. 

The mind of a typical bad cop:   “I have a gun and I can suppress any situation I am called to fix.  I can fire my weapon at the disruptive person [especially if he is black] and immediately bring the criminal into submission… or render him dead!  I did my job… why do I have to explain what I did to anyone?”

Current police strategies across America have failed in their mandate… “to protect and serve.”  In defense of police officers, they are only doing what they have been trained to do.  They have no directive, other than to maintain law and order.  Many police will say they are asked to do things for which they are not trained.  

It doesn’t have to be this way.

America needs to rethink the kind of person that will be allowed to serve in community policing.  There is no question the personality type must be reevaluated.

Soft skills must move to the top of the tool set cops are sent to the community with, the gun must move to the bottom of the toolbox.

Cops need a multidisciplinary set of skills that includes training in mediation, social work/psychology, racial sensitivity, extensive knowledge of social services programs and EMT skills.  This is NOT a brief summary program of courses… it needs to be an intensive 2-4 year program that has a healthy attrition rate, maybe 40%, that way the bad apples fall by the wayside before they are allowed to use their ”hammer” in violent abuse of the communities they would serve.

If a police person could graduate from an intensive training and education with a genuine heart to serve, ‘to do no harm’ and not think they have to always ‘win’ an encounter by any means, then maybe the future of policing will change in America.

The ray of hope, and there really is one, in today’s crisis is that it’s not just the policies communities that are profoundly unhappy with the current approach, the police themselves think the system they operate under is flawed and broken.  That’s good news.

But there are still bad cops out there who are eager to ‘win’ their encounters with anyone who is ‘out-of-line’ with how they interpret the administration of law and order.  Those individuals need to re-enlist in the military and use their aggressive mindset in conflicts with the Taliban in Afghanistan or another place where the “enemy" shoot back!

It will take several things for change to really take root:  a new attitude from the policy makers, a new-type of person who wants a policing career, skills and tools that work to solve problems, and a drastic revision in how we distinguish serious crime from social problems, and the revelry of kids and teens.

After the cruel death of George Floyd and the beginning of the riots and protests across America, my 11 year grandson sat on the sofa in our family room watching the somber news on TV.  Then came an announcement a couple of days later, that a ‘protest’ would happen in our small community [suburb of great Philadelphia] and he was worried.  He was concerned about things he had seen happening to his family… the destruction of property and the like.  I assured him he had nothing to worry about, everything would be okay, we were safe.  

But, I wondered in the privacy of my own mind if we really could be safe?  I do worry that America must change, a new order must emerge, one that honors and respects the sacredness of human life and cherishes the diversity of this country.  All races, tribes, colors.   Diversity founded this nation and made it great.  All tribes and peoples of the American landscape must once again come together and make it great again. For only ‘we the people’ — ALL the people, can make it happen.

With justice laced with grace, compassion, decency and a color-blind equality for all… we will find peace and safety for ALL Americans.

May the God of peace and compassion console the pain and anguish of the families of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and the countless men and women of all colors, who have been victims of police brutality.  

Hate cannot drive out hate… only LOVE can do that.”  -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. Internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He holds an MBA in strategic management and a doctorate in theological studies.

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Can there ever be an END to Violence Against Black People…?

You have seen the pictures, heard the news and watched people demonstrate against racism and violence done to people of color.  The question is… are you truly outraged and do you want to be part of changing this long entrenched cancer on America’s soul?

Every American should be outraged by what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd on a Minneapolis street on May 25th, pressing his knee into the 46-year-old Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while ignoring his pleas and killing him in broad daylight.   Now, Rayshard Brooks dies in Atlanta, gunned down at the hands of two police officers just this past Saturday.

The homicides, are emblematic of the racist rot at the core of American police practice, which devalues black lives even as it subjects them to heightened surveillance and criminal enforcement that white communities would never tolerate.  In fact, it would seem that growing up in America, infects ‘white’ people with racism more corrosive than any disease ever could!

Americans are right to be in the streets, and everyone regardless of your politics must support the cause of the protesters. 

If the actions of officer Chauvin (now charged with second-degree murder) and his Minneapolis Police Department colleagues were truly an aberration, or an affront to police values, cops would be leading marches across our cities and demanding swift justice for Floyd’s children and loved ones. But that’s not how it goes in America. 

The moment a window breaks, a dumpster burns, or desperate people — in this case, abandoned by their government during an economy-shattering pandemic — loot a store, calls for “order” overwhelm the drive for justice. 

And when that shift occurs, cops show their true colors. Those entrusted to protect our constitutional freedoms instead abridge them with brutal force. And in 2020, this suppression of core liberties of speech, assembly, and the press have the backing of the president, who has all but declared war on dissent.

In the police mythos, cops are supposed to hold the “thin blue line” between civilized society and disorder. But over and over in the days since Floyd’s killing, police officers themselves have become agents of chaos. 

In the uprising of 2020, it’s the cops who have been clobbering peaceful protesters with batons in the streets. We’ve seen them seize black men from peaceful crowds, just for taunting them from afar. 

We’ve even seen cops seize black men from peaceful crowds, for shouting words of love and forgiveness. We’ve seen cops handcuff black store owners who flagged them down to report looting. Perhaps most disturbing, we’ve seen cops plow into protesters with police SUVs in a deadly form of crowd control. 

Documenting these abuses is plainly a threat to police impunity. We’ve seen cops smash television cameras with riot shields, maim journalists with rubber bullets, and casually mace reporters in the face for attempting to do their job of reporting the news.

Police in America operate within a dangerous code, in which brutality against black people cannot be admitted, even in the face of video evidence. Because recognizing one crime requires recognizing them all. If George Floyd was murdered, then so was Breonna Taylor. So was Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Oscar Grant, and on and on.

It is a shattering truth to acknowledge that at random intervals, but with absolute certainty, black men and women and children can and will be destroyed by police without cause.  Why?  His is it possible in America?  They get away with it because the system and government policies enable them to brutalize people of color. 

These modern lynchings serve as a warning to all black people — to begin early survival training for children, to comport themselves with fear in public spaces, and to humble themselves before the power of the state, lest they be next.  I don’t like saying it… but teach your children to be silent and distance themselves from anything involving the police in America.

It is a valid fear for black Americans.   Police violence is a leading cause of death for young black men in this country. According to a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, over a lifetime “about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.”

This officially sanctioned violence empowers a system of white supremacy. And it is that system — and not the health and welfare of the public — that American police ultimately protect and serve. It is this racist order,  that our reactionary president seeks to buttress and elevate in his campaign to “Make America Great Again.”  

President Trump says that he stands for “law and order,” but when white demonstrators armed with semi-automatic rifles shut down state government in Michigan in early May, decrying that state’s stay-at-home order, Trump tweeted a defense of the militants: “These are very good people, but they are angry,” Trump wrote, exhorting Michigan’s governor to “see them, talk to them, make a deal.”

But when black protesters took to the streets, demanding justice from a system that treats their lives as expendable, Trump channeled the wicked spirit of Bull Connor, the infamous Alabama commissioner who directed violence against Civil Rights protesters, threatening to sic “the most vicious dogs” on anyone who breached the White House grounds, denouncing protesters as “THUGS” and vowing that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The president has vacillated between displays of cowardice — hiding in a bunker and turning out the lights at the White House — and aggression. 

In a startling burst of authoritarianism on June 1st, Trump threatened to deploy the U.S. military under the Insurrection Act to crush dissent across America, condemning the unrest accompanying the protests as “acts of domestic terrorism.” 

Then, in his own act of terror, Trump had Lafayette Park, outside the White House, swept of peaceful protesters by military police with riot shields and tear gas.

The uprising in the streets has arrived amid a pandemic that has also brought the systemic racism of America into sharp relief. Racial disparities in health care, in living conditions, and in which kinds of jobs are considered “essential,” have left black Americans in peril. They are dying at a rate three times higher than their white counterparts from COVID-19. Does anyone care?  The president’s rush to “re-open” the country, damn the death count, is further endangering black lives.

The Civil Rights generation did not dismantle America’s system of white supremacy, and ours may not either. But the giants of the 1960s opened the pathway to change — showing how daunting, and sometimes deadly, the work of demanding justice is — and we are seeing their children and grandchildren rise to their clarion call. 

“We the people”— should be encouraged by a nation taking to the streets to demand racial equality and police accountability.  “We the people” of ALL colors should be standing tall, united and strong against any system, any institution that devalues a human being because of their color and racial heritage.

Our democracy will not survive without a united color blind America.  

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Anti-Racism Movement Gaining Momentum in Social Change

The calls for racial justice and equality in America have sparked a moment of reckoning for the entertainment industry.

As protests following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among other Black Americans at the hands of police officers, have swept across the world, audiences are pressuring Hollywood studios and streaming giants to re-examine popular films and television shows.

The following shows have been yanked from their respective networks:

Gone With the Wind (HBO Max)

HBO Max, AT&T’s (T) new on-demand service that launched on May 27, pulled the classic film “Gone With the Wind” on Tuesday. The 1939 film, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s novel by the same name, is shrouded in racist depictions — both blatant and subtle. With the Civil War as the backdrop, “Gone With the Wind,” which went on to win 10 Academy Awards, perpetuates harmful stereotypes of people of color.

This decision came after movie director John Ridley penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times Monday requesting the removal of the film. This move is likely to be temporary, but WarnerMedia would bring it back with a “new introduction from a prominent African American studies scholar,” according to The Washington Post. In an unintended second order effect, the movie hit the top of Amazon’s best-sellers chart on Wednesday.

Cops (Paramount Network)

The fury around the senseless murders of Black Americans has only been rivaled by the demands to restructure or defund police forces across the country. And depictions of cops — good or bad — are being scrutinized across the board. The cop genre is a particularly popular genre, with 61.8% of prime-time dramas that aired on the four major broadcast networks focused on crime and law (21 of the 34), according to a report from civil rights advocacy nonprofit Color of Change.

Last week, Paramount Network (VIAC) pulled “Cops” from the lineup, and officially canceled the show on Tuesday. Cops, which ran for 25 seasons on Fox, was resurrected on Spike TV (now known as Paramount Network) in 2013.

“Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return,” a Paramount Network spokesperson said in a statement to Deadline.

Live PD (A&E)

Similarly, A&E’s popular flagship show Live PD was pulled last week and officially canceled on Wednesday, a day after “Cops’” pause became permanent.

“This is a critical time in our nation’s history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD. Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And with that, we will be meeting with community and civil rights leaders as well as police departments,” an A&E spokesperson told Deadline.

Host Dan Abrams expressed his disagreement with the network’s decision to pull the show. “Shocked & beyond disappointed about this...To the loyal #LivePDNation please know I, we, did everything we could to fight for you, and for our continuing effort at transparency in policing. I was convinced the show would go on,” he tweeted.

Others under scrutiny

Now there are even calls to cancel the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series “Paw Patrol,” which portrays public service officials in a positive light. The children’s show focuses on six rescue dogs that operate under the mantra "no job is too big, no pup is too small.” Parents are taking to social media to defend the well-meaning show.

Everyone better leave my son's favorite show alone, can't cancel every show in the world that has cops because of a few bad ones.. Not every cop is racist there are good police too.. Plus it's a kids show..  #IStandWithPawPatrol #PawPatrol

Beyond entertainment content, relics of white supremacy are deeply embedded in the physical foundation of America. There has been a slow unraveling of this structural racism, with more than 114 Confederate symbols removed since the 2015 Charleston massacre of nine African Americans, according to 2019 data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Since the death of George Floyd on May 25, at least seven cities across the country have removed public Confederate statues and memorials.

And top executives are under scrutiny, for institutionalizing or facilitating systemic racism in their organizations. Just this week, the editors-in-chief of Bon Appétit and Refinery29 and the CEOs of CrossFit and The Wing resigned amid accusations of racial inequity.

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Facts Worth Knowing

by Walter E. Williams, Professor at George Mason University

Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America.

A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and non-cash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, “the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world’s most affluent countries.” This includes the majority of countries that are members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, including its European members. The Just Facts study concludes that if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, then it would be one of the world’s richest.

As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles.

Most surveys on U.S. poverty are deeply flawed because poor households greatly under report both their income and noncash benefits such as health care benefits provided by Medicaid, free clinics and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, nourishment provided by food stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, soup kitchens, food pantries, the Women, Infants & Children Program and homeless shelters.

We hear and read stories such as “Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling” and “Since 2000 Wage Growth Has Barely Grown.” But we should not believe it. Ask yourself, “What is the total compensation that I receive from my employer?” If you included only your money wages, you would be off the mark anywhere between 30% and 38%. Total employee compensation includes mandated employer expenses such as Social Security and Medicare. 

Other employee benefits include retirement and health care benefits as well as life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, vacation leave, tuition reimbursement and bonuses. There is incentive for people to want more of their compensation in a non-cash form simply because of the different tax treatment. The bottom line is that prior to the government shutdown of our economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans were becoming richer and richer. The question before us now is how to get back on that path.

Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Just Facts has a couple of interesting takes in an article by its co-founder James D. Agresti and Dr. Andrew Glen titled “Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns.”

Scientific surveys of U.S. residents have found that the mental health of about one-third to one-half of all adults has been substantially compromised by government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There are deaths from non-psychological causes, such as government-mandated and personal decisions to delay medical care, which has postponed tumor removals, cancer screenings, heart surgeries and treatments for other ailments that could lead to early death if not addressed in a timely manner. 

Interesting and sadly enough, New York state enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. but has 22 times the death rate of Florida, which had one of the mildest lockdowns.

Intelligent decision-making requires one to not only pay attention to the benefits of an action but to its costs as well.

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. 

To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other 

Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the 

Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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It’s Bigger than George Floyd

Commentary by Charita Goshay

I’ve long known that no matter what I write, some of you are going to be mad about it.

That’s fine. So long as you aren’t ambivalent about what’s happening to the country we both love.

The events roiling and shaking us to our core may have been ignited by the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, but the problems have been festering since 1619.

Those demanding justice are contending this latest deadly encounter is not an aberration, but rather a burdensome norm for Americans of color.

If people didn’t love America, by the way, they wouldn’t be protesting to make a great nation even better.

Now, this shouldn’t have to be said, but there can’t be any wiggle room: Wanton acts of thievery and violence under the guise of protesting are indefensible. It only hands an excuse to people who don’t want to hear about the issue in the first place.

It’s about an unequal application of justice which results in being choked to death for selling cigarettes or trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

It’s about a 19-year-old white supremacist illegally acquiring a firearm, then using it to kill nine Americans in a church, and living to tell about it.

It’s about Tamir Rice not being allowed to live to tell how, when he was a kid, he once made a childish mistake.

It’s about James Holmes spraying a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., with bullets, then booby-trapping his apartment to kill police, and living to tell about it.

It’s about Trayvon Martin, dying for the sin of being a mouthy teenager.

It’s about Sandra Bland, being arrested during a traffic violation, and not living to fight it.

It’s about Philando Castille following a police officer’s instructions to the letter, and still not coming out alive to tell the tale.

It’s about Breonna Taylor, a first-responder in Louisville, Ky., dying in a hail of bullets because of a no-knock raid at the wrong address.

It’s about Black Lives Matter being labeled as terrorists, but not the white supremacist groups who have terrorized Americans of all races with impunity for 150 years.

It’s about the conspiracy of silence embraced by good police officers who are just trying to get home in one piece but who are protecting the unfit in their ranks.

It’s about how too many departments have moved away from community policing and toward militarization.

It’s about accountability and the need to reform, improve and standardize how policing is practiced, something that only can benefit everyone.

It’s about two Americas, one growing poorer and sicker, and the other, growing richer and richer.

It’s about the abject silence of white evangelicals and the absence of righteous anger which seems to be reserved for self-pity and those whom they support at the ballot box.

It’s about jogging while black, working while black, bird-watching while black, and how the presumption of criminality and guilt grinds away at one’s soul like water wearing down stone.

It’s about whether a great country can summon the will, the vision, and the courage to live up to its own creed as a nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

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Charita M. Goshay is a native of Canton. She is a graduate of Timken High School and Kent State University, where she majored in Communications. Goshay has been employed at the Canton Repository since 1990. Her duties have included in-house librarian, editorial assistant, and staff writer. Her areas of coverage have included Jackson Township, medicine, religion, and general assignment. Goshay, a nationally syndicated columnist at Gatehouse News Servicem is a member of the Repository editorial board. She is a seven-time Associated Press Best Columnist in Ohio and has earned recognition from the Stark Bar Association, the Greater Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, Ohio Legislature, Canton City Schools, Boy Scouts of America, Buckeye Council, and others. A founding board member of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Stark and Carroll Counties, Goshay is also a graduate of Leadership of Stark County.
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Government… Will IT Save Us?

By Steven K. Haught, MBA

Government simply doesn’t have the capacity to do all the good we want it to do in this world. Who will save us from this current crisis and what can you and I…”Us” do about it?  Last time I checked it’s still…

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Government is under incredible pressure right now. The economic crisis brought on by the pandemic, a growing recession and the ugly racism that has once again stained our social conscience.   This might be thought of as the triple whammy… three converging plagues that have hit every sector of our economic engine. 

In other words, more people out of work need government services to survive. Government simply doesn’t have the capacity to do all that needs to be done.  Right now, the “world” that matters to most Americans is America.  Who will save us from this crisis and what can you do about it?

The work of government happens at 4 levels: politics, policy, performance and people. All 4 levels get jumbled together and are thought of as government. The reality is that each of the 4 levels have a distinct and important role to play – but one level is the most critical and also the most ignored.

Let’s look at a really simple analogy. Suppose there is a big societal problem that needs government attention.  For this example, not the current problem of racism and police brutality – but something that is common to all citizens… water.  People are thirsty, and everyone is turning to government for the solution. 

Here is where the four levels of government kick in.

1. Politics. Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative. Incumbent vs. challenger. How do the politicians deal with the water/thirst crisis? It disintegrates into an ideological debate about whether people should find their own water or whether everyone should have equal access to affordable, high quality water. The ideological debate is funded on both sides by special interest groups who have an enormous stake in how the problem gets resolved.

2. Policy. Eventually the politicians lay down their arms and agree that the people need water and that government will play a role in making that happen. This is where policy kicks in. Policymaking deals with the questions of who gets the water? How much can they have? If they have water can they also have bread? Who will pay for the water? Policymaking is performed by the politicians, influenced by special interest groups and senior management of affected agencies.

3. Performance. The performance of government deals with how we actually deliver the water to those who need it. The politicians have decided people need water, the policy makers decided who gets it and how much, now the managers of government create systems (processes, procedures, tools) to deliver good water to people as efficiently as possible. The performance of government is the pipeline used to deliver the water to “customers”. The role of government managers is to continue to find ways to maintain and improve the pipelines so we have enough capacity to meet the demand. (By this point in a real-time water crisis, most people have already died from thirst, as government grinds slowly through their self-interests and egos.)

4. People. Inside all the “pipelines” of government are the people of government.  The workers in government agencies, the paid employees in various bureaucracies that are expected to make things happen. Their tasks combined with other people’s tasks are what moves the water through the systems of government to be delivered in drinkable form to thirsty people. They will first create specifications for the water, advertise for bids to be submitted for contracting for the water, then they will hire and train inspectors to inspect water producers, they will issue permits for “approved” water, then they will generate and issue water vouchers to citizens authorized to receive the water.  Of course as previously stated, everyone by this time is already dead of thirst, so its all a moot point, isn’t it?

When people think of government they jumble all four together. Outrageous acts by politicians make government workers look bad and slow their potential to act quickly to a slow laborious most redundant and inefficient process. . Bad policies and ridiculous processes make the performance of government look bad.  

Poor performance makes politicians look bad. It’s all a giant mess and everyone blames each other. It’s easy to just throw up your hands and say, “it doesn’t work”. But it can work if we focus our efforts to fix government in the right place.

We can’t change politics. No matter how many tea parties we throw or how loud we chant, “yes we can”, the political system isn’t going to change. Let’s be honest, the current political system is not designed to solve problems.

We also can’t change the people of government. No matter how many process improvement plans, and restructuring plans are developed—the way the people, the employees in the bureaucracies work will not easily be changed. 

Government agencies are full of hard working people. In fact, the number one thing private sector people who come to work in government soon discover is just how hard public sector people work (both in duration and complexity).  It may be “lather, rinse, repeat” work performance, none-the-less the employees in government agencies are not loafers, putting in time for the dime.

These hard working people are trapped in amazingly dysfunctional systems, i.e. the aforementioned pipelines. And that is where the focus of the American people has to be – fixing the pipelines, streamlining the efficiencies of agency workers which will impact the overall performance of government.

You are probably thinking, there’s no way “we the people” can change the pipelines work. The workers can only be as productive as the pipelines will allow.

Who controls the pipelines? “We the people” control the systems of government. Who has fix for the inefficient pipelines? “We the people” have the power to affect positive changes in government bureaucracies… we are the only ones who can. Here’s who can’t—politicians, policy makers and the agency employees.

The politicians. For whatever reason, and I can’t figure out why so few elected officials care about the overall performance of government.  They want to serve, they get elected and then they contribute to the same ineffective government that has existed for the past 150 years. We are in the presidential election season, and you will be watching campaigns that focus on improving government followed by fresh-start administrations that will do little or nothing to actually impact performance. At best, they try to fix subpar government performance through policy and laws, which only serves to further complicates and clog up the pipelines.

Politicians and elected officials rarely care about performance. But they should. Politicians want to tackle big new stuff. Ironically, the ability of any new administration to tackle big new issues is influenced by how they have been performing handling the old issues. Remember the never-ending health care debate?  It was framed by cogent arguments like “you want the people who run the post office and DMV to run your hospital?” Expressions like that coming from elected representatives are inflammatory and serve no purpose other than to perpetuate the political divisiveness that plagues government.  

Our government neighbors to the north in Canada have a great motto: Performance equals Trust. People’s trust in government to solve problems (currently at an all-time low) is shaped by their experience with the performance of government. If we can’t get them a birth certificate before they get their death certificate, they will rightly question our ability to improve health care.

Elected officials also need to care about performance for one simple reason—capacity. Elected officials take office with bold agendas and big plans. They want to do more things, great things.  But they quickly realize they can’t do any of it, because the systems they must depend on for implementation have no more capacity.

They want programs to improve family self-sufficiency but the social workers are maxed out. They want to increase literacy but the teachers' are maxed out. To some small degree we should probably sympathize with all the elected officials who will basically spend their entire terms in office figuring out how to shrink the pipelines, not how to quench thirst.  If they are ever going to get to their agendas, someone has to figure out how to move a ton of water through some narrow, clogged up bureaucratic processes.

The policy makers. There is no doubt policy has huge impact on government agencies. Vague rules, overly burdensome requirements or funding restrictions can kink up the pipes and seriously slow the water down. 

We can’t change policy in the abstract, rather we change policy as we examine and improve the agencies. Too often the pipelines are subordinate to the policies. Policy makers need to spend time in the pipelines to see exactly what impact their decisions have on the flow of water. The managers of the pipes need to continue to challenge policy constraints and make compelling business cases as to why change has to happen.  No well run business would ever allow itself to be bogged down by its essential pipelines for deliverables to its customers by ineffective internal policies.  People would be fired for such stupidity.

The employees. The employees work in the agencies of government – they don’t create them. They don’t make the rules or order the equipment. They show up each day to do their best work within the confines of the system created for them. Further, they are usually in one small piece of the bureaucracy and actually don’t see the whole picture because they are organized by unit, section, bureau, division and department.  They have no idea what it might be like if they worked in a “flat” structured organization, where strategic decisions can be implemented in minutes or hours, often by those making the decisions.

Their success is greatly dependent on the work done upstream from them and will be greatly influenced by the work done downstream as well.

Individuals can do much to improve their own productivity, but rarely have any influence over the productivity of the entire system. This is why employee suggestion programs rarely yield organizational transformation. Employees can see and improve their piece of the system, maybe,  but ultimately this may have no bearing on the overall performance of the system.

This is where “we the people” come in. 

Maybe you like me, have lost touch with the fact that “we” are the operational managers of America’s systems of government. “We the people” are responsible for the pipelines, the systems and the far-flung agencies that make up the structure of our government.

To change government we don’t need to fight the political machine, can’t win anyway.  And frankly, the sooner we render much of the political apparatus irrelevant, the quicker we can improve our government.

Yes, I know, you are only one person and you probably can’t rescue our democracy all on your own. No one person can.  Which is why each of us should be actively engaged with our governmental agencies and elected officials at every level, right down to the local tax collector and if you have one, a dog catcher, if its an elected position. 

Share this piece or the points it raises with your friends and family, and pledge to change a small piece of your local government together.

We really are a nation founded on the best “words” ever written down to govern the needs of a people… the Constitution.  We really are “the people” one-by-one, who can change what we don’t think is working for all peoples.

Our government takes its cues from us, and it won’t change, unless we do.  We must be involved.  We must care enough to raise our voices beyond the ballot box.  Voting is only the beginning of our responsibility as citizens and caretakers of this great nation.  We must be involved.

Right now we don’t think much is right with America.  Some say its time for a new revolution.  The climate of racial bigotry, anger and violence should make everyone think that a radical change in the way America and even the world works is long overdue.

Radical change can happen, if done in the right way.  Insurrection and violence is not the answer… collaboration and active engagement is.  Its YOU… its WE.  We cannot bring change if we allow America to be defined by divisions, racism, bitterness and anger.

We have to be united together, blessed by diversity of ideas and perspectives yes, but united and focused on a common cause… making America what she once was and can be again. 

Maybe its time to think about who you are, where you live and give your personal self-indulgences a rest in favor of being a soldier in the quest for genuine change in America.

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Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. Internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper senior executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He holds an MBA in strategic management and a doctorate in theological studies.

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