It took me a day or so to make it over, but Doc has an excellent post on our newly launched war on error that I think should be a must read for anyone beginning to lose patience with politics as usual. I’m not interested in assigning portions of blame – in my opinion, I think the whole lot should be cashiered, but Doc has the right idea – what’s next?
Catching my magpie brain (do skip over and read the whole post in context, I’ll wait):
Whatever else it causes, this war will change national priorities. Also social and personal ones.
With nobody but God and ourselves to blame, and with nobody but ourselves to help, we will put people first. And we will do our best to protect our civilization from acts of God for which people must be prepared.
The next hard question is, Which “we”? Our federal, state and local governments? Or ourselves? Or both, together, in some new way?
When the blaming stops and the fixing truly begins, we’ll need more than our government organizations to step forward. As citizens, and as groups of citizens, will need to do what government simply can’t do.
Yes, we need bureaucracies. But bureaucracies can’t imagine anything. Including predictable acts of God.
People, on the other hand, can.
In the War on Error, people will need to take the lead. Governments will need to follow or get out of the way.
While I’m not holding out hope for an end to the blame game, I think that people are now starting to intrinsically get this. I also think it’s a ripe opportunity to remind everyone that doing well financially and doing good aren’t mutually exclusive – social entrepreneurship is also the perfect breeding ground for some of these new radical thinkers to emerge from.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, in summary, the job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.
Identifying and solving large-scale social problems requires a social entrepreneur because only the entrepreneur has the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system. The scholar comes to rest when he expresses an idea. The professional succeeds when she solves a client’s problem. The manager calls it quits when he has enabled his organization to succeed. Social entrepreneurs go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, the world.
Given what we’ve seen in the past 11 days, don’t we all deserve a little world changing leadership?
Katrina | Hurricane Aid | Poverty | Social Entrepreneurship | War on Error
