Generations

It’s time for optimism in America. Right now.

I’m convinced that the best era of America is still ahead. And it’s time to start building it, even if Washington won’t, and even if the politicians are going to bring us both ups and downs in the years ahead.

When we turn on the news, we hear of debts ceilings, a $17 trillion national debt, deficits, credit rating downgrades, inflationary money, layoffs, political party anger and name-calling, leaders who won’t negotiate, government shutdowns, sequesters, defaults, international unrest and conflicts, and on and on.

It’s a bit overwhelming, and most people are either deeply frustrated or have decided not to follow the news too closely.

But this is only part of the story.

While those in Washington argue, over and over, about their latest Crisis of the Month, a lot of regular citizens have done something very important. They’ve realized that the future is up to them, and not to the politicians.

And the numbers of such people are growing. Some are getting more involved than ever before at the local level, and others are spending more time strengthening their families. Some are studying current events with real passion, and others are tackling history and the great classics in order to learn a lot more.

Still others are focusing on community projects, service, teaching the youth, and supporting charities that really need more support, and quite a few are increasing their entrepreneurship — building the economy for themselves and others instead of waiting for politicians to get their act together.

And make no mistake, when the regular people in America, Canada, and other nations realize that it’s up to them and then take action, it’s like rousing a sleeping giant. When the average citizen stands up and gets involved, like after Pearl Harbor or during the American Revolution, big things really happen.

Right now, the giant is just starting to stir. The signs are faint, but they are growing: Tea Partiers, Occupiers, protestors, bloggers, radio-show callers, “social medi-ers,” and above all, lots of newly-focused volunteers and entrepreneurs.

The people are beginning to feel the need to take their nation back, especially their economy. The future is bright.

Whatever Washington does, the leadership spirit in our homes will determine the years and decades ahead. Many experts have dubbed the 21st century “the China Century,” but in truth the reason China is growing is widespread entrepreneurship. That’s the real story.

And up until now, most freedom-lovers have argued that American entrepreneurs will bring back our economy — if Washington will just get out of the way. This message is now changing.

As the problems in politics keep increasing, more and more people are looking around, taking stock, and saying, “You know what? Washington might never get its act together. So, I guess it’s up to me.”

This is the spirit of enterprise, and there is almost no power in the world as strong as a people fully committed to free enterprise.

This is an exciting time. Instead of waiting for the politicians to free up the economy, we’re now making the great FreedomShift: Regardless of what Congresses and Presidents and Justices do, let’s build our families, communities, and the economy to a whole new level — and show Washington what to do. We’re the leaders now. When we lead, the politicians will have to follow.

If you haven’t joined this movement yet, today is a good time to start.

Build a business.
Or read a great classic.
Start a class for kids in your area.
Or begin attending all your city council meetings.
Make and follow a plan to double your savings rate.

Brainstorm. Identify where your passions are, and then take action to genuinely improve your life and the world around you.

Get started. The economy and society need you. It’s up to us.

What the media and politicians don’t realize is that this is happening. The worse Washington gets, the more people are taking personal action. It’s real. And it’s growing. Whatever Washington does, this is the movement that will make or break our future.

Smile. Laugh with a friend. Tell your kids a joke and giggle together. Tell them that the future is bright. And take action to make it true.

Now is a time for real optimism.

Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.

Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Washington is broken, and the problem is short-term thinking.

In our current system, there is little or no incentive for our leaders to do what is right for the next generation — if it in any way conflicts with immediate concerns.

We know debt is bad, but in the short-term it’s easier to keep spending. And we realize that deficits are a problem, but it’s easier to ignore this problem and keep raising the debt ceiling.

This problem is systemic. For example, our business world is too often dominated by “Quarterly Capitalism,” which means that most companies manage their business one quarter at a time. The cause of this is the way our tax system is structured, with the government forcing this quarterly approach on business.

Likewise, nearly all politicians are required to adopt what Al Gore called “Quarterly Democracy.” Specifically, everyone raising money for political campaigns must report quarterly on how much they’ve raised, and this drives future fundraising and influences media support and opposition of each candidate.

As a result of these quarterly laws enforced by Washington, our business and political leaders are legally required to focus on the short term.

This is a serious problem. It impacts our national finances in a very damaging way. Anytime anyone — from either party or no party — suggests real solutions to current financial challenges, from budgets and debts to deficits and entitlements and debt ceilings and credit ratings, it is quickly ignored or rejected because real solutions can’t be implemented in 90 days or less.

This is a fundamental structural weakness of our current system of governance. Even when party or government leaders agree with a proposed solution, they can’t fit it in to the 3-month cycle and therefore it is always put on the back burner while they focus on immediate issues.

The framers incentivized the masses to think in annual election cycles, the House in two-year cycles, the Executive in four-year cycles, and the Senate in six-year cycles. These concentric cycles encouraged short-, intermediate-, and long-term thinking all at once.

Today, in contrast, pretty much all of our elected officials and business leaders tend to think in 90-day cycles, and the people have been sucked in to this pattern.

In fact, the masses of citizens, who are mostly now required by law to follow the monthly, bi-monthly, or even weekly pattern of paying taxes and bills with every paycheck (instead of annually when all revenues and expenditures are totaled for their businesses or farms), are widely caught in a paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. Indeed, they think monthly, while their leaders think quarterly.

The one group that was supposed to provide truly long-term thinking, the Supreme Court, has frequently done so on social issues but for the last few decades has failed to do so in financial matters. There are few indications that this will change any time soon.

This all benefits the wealthy elite, who do apply a long-term approach and thereby easily rule the rest of society that is caught in a “rat race” of short-term activity and confusion. Faulkner appropriately called it a “sound and fury.”

Hardly any American leaders today are focused on the next thirty years, taking effective actions that will create lasting national progress. In contrast, many leaders in China and India speak in terms of 50, 100 and even 200 years.

Canadian business leader Claude Hamilton called attention to last summer’s meeting between the presidents of the U.S. and China. In their opening remarks, the Chinese president noted China’s great progress over the past two centuries, and outlined Chinese goals for the decades and century ahead. Then President Obama responded by outlining the major contributions of his Administration during the past four years.

The contrast is glaring. We don’t really think about the future, at least not in terms of taking real action. If we did look ahead in any serious way, we’d see the absolute necessity of fixing our fiscal, monetary, entitlement, debt and budgetary problems. We are quickly headed for national financial disaster, but we can’t see it because it looks years off instead of weeks.

In short, our system is broken, and nothing will fix it until we once again learn to take a long-term approach. I don’t know how this can happen. The traditional way, which has worked at many times in human history, is to study history and learn its lessons.

But our current thinking is so myopically short term that when most modern people read history it doesn’t even seem relevant — like watching a movie that is interesting but doesn’t have much to do with us in real life.

I don’t know what the solution is to all this, because any real fix will include a long-term change. And today’s leaders and people mostly don’t understand how to do long-term fixes.

Suggest anything that will take five, ten, or twenty years, and many people today simply give you a blank stare. Then they click on the news and focus on stories that will be forgotten in 48 hours.

Through all of human experience, there have been two effective solutions to this problem:

1. One is for the people to start reading history and classics and thinking in the long-term.
2. The second is for the society to go through a major crash, war, depression or pandemic that forces people to slow down, reassess, and see the big picture.

I hope we still have time to choose the first option.

Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.

Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

It could be over. The whole, centuries-long debate between men and women, as well as between women and women, over the best role for women, may be coming to an end.

Ironically, this hinges not so much on women or men, but on both. And on children too.

Let me explain.

Feminism has progressed through several phases in history.

1. First, women demanded voting and other basic equality with men.
2. Second, they argued for the basic intrinsic equality of both genders.
3. Third, they sought legal equality in the Equal Rights Amendment era.

All of these strategies made sense to men and women, even those who disagreed with the various leaders and agendas of feminism. After all, the idea of seeking equitable treatment and rights is basic to most Americans.

But at some point, starting in the 1980s, feminism took several interesting, and surprising, turns. Most men were shocked by the intensity of the woman vs. woman debate between those who argued that all women should have full-time careers and those who felt that such a choice was a downgrade for women, that their best work was done in the home.

This was followed by the “We Can Have It All” era, where many young women idealized having both full-time careers and all the benefits and rewards of full-time homemaking. One side said this was the ideal, another side argued that this was a mere illusion.

And finally, in the most recent evolution of feminist debates, dubbed “The Mommy Wars” by the media, some promoters of women in careers and some who believe that homemaking is the female ideal faced off in increasingly tense and extremely strong language.

By this point in the dialogue, men were basically left out of the conversation. National reports showed that more women than men are in college, and that men’s financial outlook is in decline while the earning future for women is bright.

Feminism was still a passionate topic, but the battling sides were made up almost exclusively of women.

That brings us to today. We now seem to be entering yet another major era of this discussion, but this time men are back in the conversation. They are front and center, in fact.

Women are increasingly talking about what men should, or shouldn’t, be. The idea seems to be that if men would just get their act together, many of the modern problems faced by women would be solved.

Like past battles, this one tends to anger almost everyone who thinks about it. One side makes the case that women are better off just living independently. They can have men in their life, if they choose, as long as they don’t become dependent on a man.

In fact, this view seems to accept that men will come and go, and that ultimately a woman has herself, her education and career, and a few close (women) friends that she can really depend on.

Her battles, in this narrative, are against enemies and frenemies, who are nearly always other women — not against men.

This worldview shows up in numerous recent movies and a host of articles in women’s magazines. Watch popular women’s talk shows, and this perspective is nearly always accepted as a fundamental — and undebatable — assumption.

On the other side is a growing view that men and women are very different, that each should fully engage their differences, and that both are happiest when this occurs.

As I said, this is ruffling feathers wherever the new view is shared.

Many women who agree with the historical goals of feminism — and men who view themselves as enlightened, modern, sensitive males — find this newly popular perspective corrupt, positively medieval, and above all, baffling.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this new era of discussion about men and women is that the majority view (the “Independent Woman”) patently refuses to even entertain the growing new perspective (“Real Men/Real Women”).

It is similar to when feminism first began, and men just ignored it, discounted it, or perhaps even laughed at it. This is how the current majority Independent Woman crowd is treating the growing Real Man/New Women minority.

In case you haven’t yet heard this new perspective, it goes something like this:

• Men are happiest when they are deeply involved in a chosen life mission that centers around their deepest interests and passions, their life purpose.
• Women want just such a man; anything less is a letdown to them.
• Men want a woman who will support them in this purpose and help them achieve it.
• Women are happiest when they are helping a man who is deeply engrossed in such a life mission, and raising sons who will someday pursue just such a mission and daughters who will help a man do this as well.

For the Independent Woman crowd, the Real Man/Real Woman view sounds a lot like a modern return to the worst elements of old-style patriarchy, the very reason that feminism was invented.

But as feminism proved, just ignoring this growing minority perspective isn’t going to make it go away.

A lot of people, both men and women, swear by this rising view. For them, women are equal to men, and should have all the same opportunities in education and work. And the happiest equal men and women, they maintain, follow these simple guidelines.

Men want a woman who above all wants to support him and raise a family, and women want a man who gives his life to a central purpose and raising a family.

If a man doesn’t have a life mission, a great purpose, he isn’t going to be very happy. And his woman won’t be very impressed with him. Neither will she feel valued or fulfilled in a marriage if her spouse does not depend on her to help in a real, important purpose.

This is the immediate future of feminism, the debate between the Independent Woman viewpoint and the Real Man/Real Woman perspective. Like I said, this is making a lot of people angry.

On the humorous side, this really is a return to the beginning of the whole debate about feminism. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, I guess.

But there is one big difference this time: the Independent Woman crowd is in the majority — at least in the media, academia, government, and other centers of pop culture.

How this difference impacts the debate remains to be seen.

Just to be clear, I agree with the Real Man/Real Woman side of this argument. I’m just fine with men or women being fully independent. I think we should all have the freedom to choose what we want, and the fact that my daughters (I have 5) have as many options as my sons makes me very happy.

I also think that the happiest men are passionately focused on a great life purpose, and the happiest women are married to such men — where they help each other in the most important parts of life.

Are they equal? Of course. Are they different? Of course. Should this be used as an excuse for men to control women, or for women to control men? Of course not.

But here’s the real problem: Our modern society is structured by the elitist class to convince the rest of us not to engage a central life mission or purpose. We are taught to get an education that will give us a job, a career, working for corporations and institutions run by the upper class. We are taught that our great life passions and interests are at best hobbies.

We are taught that well-paid professional drone work is the ideal — for men and for women. We are taught that children should be trained in schools run by the policies of elitists, seeking the goals outlined by elitists for those in the middle and lower classes.

This message is being taught in nearly every school in modern America. It is being promoted from Hollywood, and encouraged by Madison Avenue. It is being increasingly regulated and enforced from Washington.

Worst of all, more and more parents teach this message to their kids: “Get good grades, get into a good college, get a good career, and spend most of your adult hours working for someone else’s profit and power. This is the key to a happy life.”

As long as this lie dominates our society, a majority of men and women are going to miss out on real life. That’s the future of feminism, manhoodism, childhoodism, socialism, and capitalism.

It’s a serious problem.

For men, women, and children.

And the only thing that has any chance of changing it is Real Man/Real Woman ism. Real Men and Real Women find a great life purpose and give their all for it. And, where possible, they do this together. This is the key to a happy life.

That’s where I stand. I hope you do too.

Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.

Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.