The "I Hate to Blog" Blog

In 2004, I was selected to attend the U.S. Army War College through their distance learning option. Right about the same time, I discovered that I had enough active duty time to retire from the Army about nine or ten years early, so a War College diploma became unnecessary from the professional and fiscal perspectives. So I withdrew from the course.

However, before I withdrew, I completed a little bit of the course material. The first sub course after I completed and passed the initial writing assignment was about senior leadership. While I’m a lousy student for the most part, I do occasionally pay attention and this time I paid attention. 

The biggest thing I came away with was that senior leadership is more about building consensus and negotiating solutions than it is about the more familiar vision of military officers leading troops around the motor pool or into battle. During my six years assigned to the Pentagon, I found this to be accurate. As a colonel, I observed that organizations needed me to be a consensus builder and needed far less of the stereotypical motivational leadership than the units to which I’d been assigned in the past. The War College course material said that this is as it should be. And I agree.

Fast forward to today. If, as I believe, senior leadership is about consensus building and assuming we consider that those running the legislative and executive branches of government are to be considered the senior leaders of our Nation, then I contend that Washington is suffering a severe leadership deficit.

Severe. 

This is not about Republican versus Democrat. This is not about left or right. If one examines the actions of the President and the leaders in both houses of Congress, it is clear to me that no one – not one individual is publicly engaging in any sort of leadership whatsoever nor is anyone in DC attempting to bill themselves as a true senior leader. 

I could list quote after quote from either side of the aisle in Congress and from the White House supporting the observation that the blame game is well underway. But since you’re all my friends, I know that you’re well aware of current events and can draw your own conclusions from news reports. I believe that we can all agree that little if any consensus building is happening publicly. If it’s happening behind closed doors in smoke-filled halls of Congress, no one knows about it and frankly I’d be surprised if it were. 

But back to the point: Our Nation needs leaders – real leaders who possess the necessary senior leadership skills and experience and the will to exercise them to the benefit of the Nation. We elect our President to LEAD the business of government not to observe the business of government. We elect our President to LEAD not to cajole and belittle legislators into specific behavior. We elect our Congressmen to represent our interests, negotiate among themselves and the Executive branch and come to consensus on viable solutions to fulfill our interests while maintaining the best interests of the entire Nation.

At this, they are all failing miserably. 

There is no leadership in Washington because there exists no attempt to build consensus among those in the government who disagree. 

I believe that the President, the single most visible face of the Nation and by definition the most senior leader in government has the DUTY to lead and build consensus in the National interest in spite of the political climate. I believe the President should be leading the Nation in the context of the United States as his top priority. The President isn’t the President of the Democratic Party, but the President of the United States. 

I observe none of this and therefore conclude that in the context of senior leadership, the White House is leaderless.

As for Congress, I recognize and embrace that it is by nature a more partisan organization. I expect there to be discourse, disagreement and politics played among its members. But in the end, I expect the senior leaders in Congress to lead their respective parties while building consensus in the context of the Nations best interests. 

Sadly, I observe none of that either. Therefore, I also conclude that in the context of senior leadership, Congress is leaderless. 

Its been said by hundreds of other journalists, commentators and other observers that our government is the most divided, most partisan and least productive body in generations. I agree. 

I do not believe, however, that this is a problem resulting from a clash of ideas that has no resolution. I do not believe that the Legislative and Executive branches of government are hopelessly deadlocked because there’s a great ideological gulf between them. I believe that it’s the lack of leadership skills and experience that makes resolution unlikely. I believe that no one has the will to find consensus and in fact, I believe that the senior leaders of our Nation think that consensus is a dirty word.

Our senior leaders aren’t leading. It’s that simple.

I never really planned on owning firearms.  Frankly, I never gave it much thought.  My father, who passed away a couple years ago, always had a small Ruger .22 pistol at the ready for dispatching marauding groundhogs from his garden to that great groundhog beyond.   But to my knowledge, that’s all he ever used it for.  When I was a little kid, he took me out in the woods and let me shoot it.  My admittedly vague memories of the day are that he told me it was a hair trigger and then I popped off three rounds into a nearby tree and that was that.

At summer camp, I always took marksmanship classes, though for a couple of years, I got really excited about archery.  Archery has a certain elegance about it that I still find appealing.  I even had my own bow and a modest quiver of arrows from the Bear Archery Company and got to be pretty good for a kid of my limited age.  But as most things do when you’re young, I lost interest after a couple of years and discovered some other hobby to pursue.  

Fast forward to the Army.  In my nearly 29-year career, I shot all sort of goodies from howitzers and machine guns to the Beretta 9mm, the standard issue for Army officers for the last half of my career.  For nearly 270 days straight while deployed to Bosnia, I strapped my 9mm to my shoulder and walked around with live ammunition, occasionally loading the magazine into the weapon for trips off post.  That was mandatory.  So was clearing it three times a day on each trip to the chow hall.  Safety first and all that.

I’ve never been shot at and I’ve never fired a weapon in self-defense even though I’ve spent time in places where such things routinely occurred.  Let’s face it, rifle ranges are intended to work in one direction only, and if you find yourself on a two-way rifle range, you’re in a shootin’ war of some sort.  I got lucky and never had to experience that.

So the upshot (pun intended) of all this is that I have fired and carried firearms for most of my adult life. Though even during the Los Angeles riots in the early ‘90’s, I’ve never been in a situation in which I needed to brandish my weapon for defense or for any other reason.  But I understand weapons, know how to use them and have a healthy respect for the damage they can inflict when used for nefarious purposes.  

After the massacre at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater a few months back, I found myself thinking about what I’d do if I found myself in such a situation.   (We guys always do that!  You know, like could I land a 747 if the pilots were all out of commission?)  More importantly, I found myself thinking about what I would do to defend Nate or Garrett, the 5 and 7-year-old kidlings I often take to the movies.   My first thought was that I’d hope I have the presence of mind and the courage to cover them with my body and protect them.  But the more I thought about this, the more I thought that all I was doing was trying to prevent them from becoming victims not really defending them.  As for me?  Well, such an action would have no hint of defense in it for me.  Instead, I would be instantaneously submitting myself to victimhood no matter the perceived nobility of purpose.  And I didn’t like the sound of that.

It’s an academic discussion.  I fully recognize that such a scenario is extremely unlikely to unfold in my presence making it all a fun exercise in mental gum chewing.  But I still didn’t like the idea of immediately submitting myself to victimhood.  It bugged me.  

Then came the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.  Just as the rest of our Nation did, I watched the news unfold as the information assaulted me from TV, radio and the Internet.  I thought about what it would be like to have been in a position to stop the slaughter or at the very least to mitigate the carnage.  But I would have been just as helpless as the principal at Sandy Hook, Dawn Hochsprung, who armed only with her passion to protect her students, courageously and nobly tried to subdue the vicious, crazy bastard and lost her life in the process.  She didn’t stand a chance.  She became a victim the moment that she took the first step toward the attacker.

I’m not going to make the argument about gun control from the facts in these words I’ve written.  I’m not in a position to make decisions for you or for anyone else.  Each of us has to decide what they can live with and what they can’t.  When you stare at yourself in the mirror in the morning, we each have to live with whatever decisions we make.  I’m not going to make decisions for anyone about what constitutes “having done enough” to protect the people they care about.  But for me, I’ve come to the conclusion that submitting myself to victimhood in order to protect my family is not enough.   

I’m trained and will continue to train.  I have a healthy respect for firearms and what they can do.  I also know that were I ever to draw a firearm in defense of life or property, I’m going for the head shot.  There’s no such thing as “shoot to wound.”  That protects the attacker and not the family. I’m not in the attacker protecting business.  

So now I’m armed.  Not all the time, of course, but I’m not going to publish openly under what conditions I will be.  I don’t like the idea, but for me it’s not enough to hope that you’re not going to get hit by a random gunman’s bullet.  Hope is no more of a defense than it is an economic strategy.  My checkbook balance represents this harsh reality.  My legally concealed handgun represents it too.

Our world has become a very different and very weird place since my dad took me out to shoot his .22 Ruger back in the early 60’s.  The world has even changed since I left Los Angeles just ten years ago.   It used to seem that you could stay safe by avoiding parts of town known for higher crime rates, but it seems as though it’s getting tougher and tougher to do that.  It’s not enough for me to avoid bad areas and plan to sacrifice myself for the safety of my family.  

It’s just not enough.

Neil Armstrong was a true hero to those of us who grew up in the 60’s. The moon landing in 1969 was the one brief moment in my albeit lousy memory in which, in the midst of domestic upheaval, Humankind — not just Americans were united. His quiet seclusion over the decades since belies his importance to that pivotal and fleeting moment in our history. While others have stepped forward to varying degrees to share with us the memories of those heady days and gotten their just rewards, Armstrong remained in the shadows of his equally heroic colleagues. As the focus of the world for his first steps on another celestial body, he deserves much more. He as the hero I wanted to be. He was the hero we all wanted to be.