Dave Rogers's eloquence

I don't know what Dave Rogers does for a living -- if anything, since he's retired USN. I do know that I appreciate his POV, regularly stirred up on Groundhog Day (his blog), which succeeded the earlier incarnation, "Time's Arrow." Were that I was as eloquent as Mr. Rogers.

I point to a post from the other day entitled, Changes, in which Mr. Rogers ruminates about the failure of leadership behind the Gulf Coast catastrophe left in Katrina's wake. It's a long and winding tale, well worth following through because where it ends is at a pot of gold. Mr. Rogers says well much of what I've tried to communicate in so many places and ways. For me a core aspect of his essay comes toward the end, and I've extracted it here:

What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.

Regardless of whether public service is, in fact, an essential element of creating and/or sustaining a "community" sensibility in people who have become largely attached to the market mentality, there is a lot in this nugget of observation itself. Regular (or even constipated irregular) readers can look to this space for the draft of an essay tentatively entitled, "To thine own self, be . . partial" on this very subject.

Way to go Mr. Rogers.

Posted by Grayson at September 7, 2005 07:28 AM