A Global Perspective

An essay on values, worldviews, and current events

Imagine something disturbing happens in your neighborhood.  Let’s say kids throwing rocks at one another or vandalizing mailboxes.  Most of us will walk outside, gather in front of our homes and talk about the issue sensibly because we know we share a common experience and some level of shared responsibility.  We see each other come and go daily, and our children play together so we must not bury our heads in the sand in a shameful or cowardly act of denial or avoidance.

Magnify the issues from a very local, micro level to a national, macro level, and the ability to act shamefully without accountability presents itself.  Here our personal values (rather than shared values) are allowed to drive the discussion.  But what happens when we can no longer find the common ground to even know that we are discussing the same issue anymore?

Two events are occupying the headlines and most thinking folk’s minds this week: gun control in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, and the “fiscal cliff” the US government is heading towards.

Today, the National Rifle Association finally held a press conference where they finally gave a response to the events of Newtown, proposing armed police officers at every school could have prevented the shootings.  The NRA spokesman said “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  He somehow forgot to point out there was a uniformed police officer on campus at Columbine in 1999.

How did the press report these statements from the powerful gun lobby?  Over at Fox News, they thoughtfully (ahem) considered the option suggested by the NRA.

Leading with the NRA’s proposal, down below on the same page, it looks like the Republicans are waiting on Obama to address the fiscal cliff.  Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post, the NRA’s proposal was seen much differently.

The Huffington Post addresses the Right’s fiscal cliff shortcomings further “below the fold.”

I am assuming you can see the subtle differences in their respective views of gun control.  And with the fiscal cliff negotiations, the way in which the left and right interpret the actions of one another is as different as night and day.

Why do these two see the world in such completely different ways?  The answer is easy: values.  Values inform our decisions and influence the way we see things, our “worldview”.

In a course I took at the University of Houston earlier this year, Andy Hines presented an insightful outline of alternative perspectives.  (Hines is the author of “ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape.”)  In the presentation he gave an overview of how values can be defined and how they shift over time.

In my opinion, Fox News would seem to represent “traditional” values, and the Huffington Post would represent “post modern” values.  These are the same values that you and I hold ourselves, but don’t always realize it in ourselves, nor in others.  We tend to think that people around us share our values at some level. 

But how close are we?  Someone in the traditional column may use their discretionary income to make a donation to their local church, or think it wise to buy a hand gun to provide their family a feeling of security.  Their neighbor next door might use their money to attend a yoga retreat in the Caribbean or redecorate their home according to Feng Shui principles. 

And each neighbor would think the other one was completely fucking crazy wasting their money.

This became painfully evident to me this week in an online discussion with a friend regarding gun control and the 2nd Amendment.  Jon and I are both the same age and race, both have kids, both have MBA degrees from Georgetown, and are both entrepreneurs.  Of course we would agree on how to read the 2nd Amendment.

Nope.  Not even close.  We couldn’t read the 2nd Amendment and agree on the definitions of the words in those few short sentences.  It turns out that Jon and I hold completely different values.  And those values shape our worldview.

To complicate things further, even sharing the same language doesn’t mean we are communicating the same ideas.  Ludwig Wittgenstein made a compelling argument that language alone is not a system of communication.  In addition to language, we must use gestures, facial expressions, eye movements, limb movement and the tone of our voice to “indicate the affections of the soul.”  And even then, that is only an approximation of what we are trying to communicate.

In Jon’s worldview, people first act in their own self-interest and life has meaning, direction and purpose with predetermined outcomes.  In my worldview, I believe people want to get along and feel accepted in a caring community, and we should live fully and responsibly with flexibility and spontaneity as the highest priorities.

How do we work together to figure out gun control and government spending?  Maybe we should step back from arguing the sanity of assault rifles being sold at WalMart and the concept that lowering tax rates would somehow increase tax revenue.  Because we will never agree.  Maybe instead, we should start at the beginning.  Agree that we need to care for those who need us.  Agree that when love isn’t perfect, we can learn to forgive one another.  Agree that teaching our children to have character is far more important than having a unique personality (e.g. Kardhasian syndrome).

And from those shared values, reassemble the world around us.  We would then be able to reconsider the role of government spending, and the purpose of guns in our lives.

Before I go, let’s check back in with Fox News and the Huffington Post and see the world through their eyes again.  Maybe they have moved closer to a shared worldview in the last hour or so…

The President is going on vacation, and will apparently be turning his phone off and not checking email.  Come on Huffington Post, please shed some liberal light on this turn of events! 

I guess the Huffington Post hasn’t finished their expose on the President’s vacation plans yet.

Chris

(Just a couple of) the Obama Administration’s accomplishments:

1. The first bill President Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to help women fight back when they don’t get equal pay for equal work.

2. His Recovery Act supported millions of jobs and helped to stave off a second Great Depression.

3. He pushed for and won middle-class tax cuts that benefitted every American worker, and saved the typical family $3,600 in taxes over the last four years.

4. President Obama rescued the auto industry, and now GM and Chrysler are healthier than they’ve ever been. The American auto industry has added nearly a quarter of a million jobs since June 2009 — and they most likely wouldn’t exist right now without President Obama’s leadership.

5. He doubled funding for Pell Grants, helping to make college more affordable for nearly 10 million families.

6. His student loan reform ended billions in subsidies to banks serving as middlemen and reinvested those savings directly into students.

7. The President established the American Opportunity Tax Credit, worth up to $10,000 over four years of college.

8. His Race to the Top Initiative helped spur nearly every state to raise academic standards.

9. His tax cuts, social-welfare programs, and economic policies lifted nearly 7 million Americans above the federal poverty line in 2010. 

10. President Obama has signed 18 tax cuts for small businesses since taking office.

11. We’ve seen 5.2 million new private-sector jobs over the last 31 months.

12. The unemployment rate is at the lowest level since President Obama took office.

13. Health care reform — passed after decades of failed attempts by every previous President — provides affordable health coverage to every American and will lower premiums by an average of $2,000 per family by 2019.

14. Obamacare expanded access to lifesaving preventive care such as cancer screenings and immunizations with no out-of-pocket costs for 54 million Americans.

15. Obamacare ends insurance discrimination against the 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions. 

16. Because of Obamacare, over 3 million more young adults have health insurance today than would if the new law hadn’t passed.

17. The parents of over 17 million children with pre-existing conditions no longer have to worry that their children will be denied coverage.

18. President Obama has ordered the overhaul of federal government regulations to make them smarter, practical, and more efficient. Just a fraction of these commonsense initiatives will help save businesses $10 billion in the next five years alone.

19. His historic investments in clean energy have helped more than double the amount of electricity we obtain from wind and solar sources and helped increase biofuel production to its highest level in history.

20. President Obama is doubling fuel efficiency standards, which will save drivers more than $8,000 at the gas pump, not to mention lessen the impact of automobiles on our environment.

21. President Obama has taken unprecedented action to address climate change, reaching historic international agreements to curb carbon emissions, and taking action here at home to reduce carbon pollution from our vehicles and promote clean energy production.

22. He has taken historic action to protect our environment — signing one of the largest expansions of protected wilderness in a generation and putting in place standards to reduce toxic air pollution that will save thousands of lives.

23. President Obama fought for and won landmark Wall Street reform that reins in the abuses that led to the financial crisis and ends the era of taxpayer bailouts and “too big to fail.”

24. Wall Street reform created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the nation’s first federal agency focused solely on consumer financial protection — and the Bureau is already protecting families from unfair and abusive financial practices from Wall Street banks and shadowy corners of the financial industry.

25. As part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency, the White House has posted its visitor records online for the first time ever.

26. President Obama’s all-of-the-above approach to energy has helped cut the United States’ dependence on foreign oil to its lowest level in 20 years.

27. President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq.

28. He announced a plan to end the war in Afghanistan and transition security responsibility to the Afghan people.

29. President Obama sent the largest security assistance package to Israel in history and funded the Iron Dome system, which is protecting Israeli homes and schools from rocket attacks.

30. President Obama rallied the international community to implement the toughest sanctions on Iran in history.

31. Through the President’s historic increases in Veterans Affairs funding, he has expanded and improved healthcare and job training access for our returning veterans.

32. President Obama negotiated the New START Treaty with Russia to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in both countries. At the same time, he also secured commitments from dozens of other countries to lock down nuclear materials.

33. His administration naturalized 11,146 military service members as U.S. citizens in 2010; more than in any year since 1955.

34. President Obama set a bold new plan for the future of NASA space exploration, using the skill and ability of the private sector for short trips to the International Space Station, while building a new vehicle for exploration of distant space, and doing everything in his power to support the economy on Florida’s Space Coast.

35. President Obama recognizes that tourism is one of America’s largest economic engines; he’s worked to encourage international visitors to come here, maintaining our security while keeping millions of Americans in good, paying jobs.

36. He has affirmed his personal support of marriage equality, directed the Justice Department to stop defending DOMA in federal courts, and took the practical and compassionate step of extending hospital visitation rights to same-sex partners.

37. He fought for and won the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, allowing gay and lesbian members of the military to serve openly for the first time in history.

38. When Congress failed to fix our broken immigration system, his administration did everything in its power to improve it, streamlining the legal immigration process and announcing a policy that lifts the shadow of deportation from hard working young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

39. Oh, and he gave the order to send troops in after Osama Bin Laden — and has decimated al-Qaeda’s senior leadership.