Pastor Dan had a diary entry on hate a couple of days ago which I read a couple of times and thought about over the evening.
Pastor Dan's On Hate Diary Entry
I've been studying hate for the last 10 years. Not in a "professional" sense, but in the way a person who just became sensitive to wheat or milk might start looking for those things in there every day environment. It started watching how the "community" and people in America expressed their hate to young people. It spread to noticing hate in the media and in political orientations. It was a study within a study during a penison scandal in Milwaukee a few years ago.
Last May I was invited to give a talk to a group of individuals who had completed a "Leadership" training program. I chose to speak about leadership and hate. The following is my speech on leadership and hate and ministries.
I noticed that when I got my flyer about graduation it said I would have pearls of wisdom. That's a hard one But maybe I can provide you with some thoughts and observations about leadership and some of the events in Milwaukee County the past couple of years.
I finished my Future Milwaukee Leadership program in 2000 and, as a person I greatly admire stated, it help start me on a path and it gave me a frame of reference for operating in an upper management position.
Was I a "leader" before I started or after I finished the program? I don't know. I just know I tried to do my best at those things that were important. But exposure to something, an idea or an event continues to shape and form our lives long after the event.
Of course, I read a lot before I started the program but after graduating from, I began reading more on leadership style, management issues and leaders in general. Folks like Covey, Maxwell, Tom Peters, and about topics such as Emotional IQ, Sun Tuz and the Art of War, von Clausewitz, team building. And about leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, Patton and Welch. I even read the Leadership Tony Soprano Style.
Through my thoughts and mediations, I realized that NO ONE TEACHES LEADERSHIP, yet society expects there to be leaders. For those of who have gone to college, maybe even have a college degree to two, what class did you take that focused on LEADERSHIP.
Outside of this program, where did you learn the nuts and bolts stuff about styles and what makes a good leader? Even in this class, you did a lot to find out about yourself, your styles and some of the functional aspects of organizational operations and responsibilities but how are you different NOW than before? Are you a "better leader" than before? And if so, how and how do you know?
As I said, I do a lot of reading. As a rule of thumb, every year I always buy and read The Best American Essays. Following 9/11 everyone was working through that trauma, and that includes American literature. The Best American Essays for 2002 basically dealt with the terrorist attack.
There was an essay by John Sack, originally published in Esquire Magazine, called Inside the Bunker. The essay is the reflections of a journalist, A Jewish journalist who has written about the holocaust including a piece regarding Gleiwitz, Germany which was a slave labor camp associated with Auschwitz.
Sack wrote about how he was invited to present at a conference of individuals who deny that the holocaust happened. His essay describes how he thought this meeting would be with neo-Nazis' and fascist's of the most horrible sort but how his 2-3 days with these very decent people changed his perspective, and maybe how he changed theirs.
We'll come back to that in a couple of minutes.
I worked for 13 years for Milwaukee County. I started in the last 9 months of the Schultz administration, all of Aments administration and the first year or so of Walker's administration,
I moved from the Department of Administration, Fiscal services to county health programs and finally the Depart of Health and Human Services. I knew - worked closely with some of them - a lot of the individuals whose names are closely associated with the pension scandal: Ament, Ordinans, Dobbert, Kocourek, Zenlinski, Ott.
Now working with elected individuals is an experience unlike any other, especially for those of you who are finishing this program without any reference to working with an elected official because once elected, it is automatically assumed that the elected person is a leader.
Winning an election, regardless of your work history, your community involvement, your professional successes or failures, automatically sets a default of "leader" in your portfolio. Truck driver one day, next day an authority on government matters. Maybe a clerk at Pick N Save and the next day, now a community LEADER.
During the recall effort and the final election process between Scott Walker and Jim Ryan, I saw Tyrone Dumas at a function and we started talking. Tyrone is an incredible man. Very well known and respected in the Black community, well known in government circles and a respected public servant. I told him that I read and appreciated a letter that was published in the Shepard Express concerning issues and possible solutions for the county in its time of its crisis.
He told me the following story. He had submitted the letter to the Journal Sentinel (JS) for its inclusion in the discussions concerning the county situation. You might remember that it published some articles by former County Executive Dave Schultz and other regarding the problems. Tyrone's comments were returned by the JS and when he asked why, he was told that because he wasn't an elected official, he wasn't a community leader.
What a loss for the citizens to be held ignorant of ideas and solutions by the local media because it assumes that leadership is equal to electability. And that elect ability automatically means leader.
As the pension issue unfolded, I was watching the soap opera of events. The paper published daily pieces on Ament. On an hourly basis it seemed, hate radio filled the air with generalized statements of county employees and large pension payouts. There was even a bill-board on the south side of the county near 7 mile road for a local auto dealer that basically said "Buy here because not everyone has a county pension."
I was watching this daily feeding of anger and outrage by the local media markets and then watching the impact of feeding this hate to the public.
Of course, none of the stories covered by the JS or talked about on the radio mentioned the 99.9% of employees that comprise the real workforce of the County. None of the stories talked about individuals whose entire lives were dedicated to helping the sick and poor at the county hospital, the mentally ill at the Mental Health Complex or Highway workers maintaining the roads when the temperature is 20 below and sleet/snow storms are raging.
These fellow citizens who were also county employees - working 20-30 years, maybe longer - washing floors, helping poor people die with dignity and respect, feeding and assisting the mentally ill at the County Mental Health Complex. Not one story about hundreds of lives dedicated to others whose return for that service was an annual pension of MAYBE $30,000 or basically $1,000 a year for each year of their service.
I heard stories from fellow county employees of being insulted in grocery stores and shopping areas by people who that knew they worked for the county. Maybe they had on a county Parks shirt or a DPW Highway crew jumpsuit. But to be insulted and called a criminal because of where you worked?
Hourly park employees who were picking up trash,
no benefits just a check for a little more than minimum wage getting yelled at by passing cars and being told to fuck off by fellow citizens of this county because of the hate and anger they were being feed by the media.
I watched how it hurt these decent and upright people, I could feel their pain and deep hurt as they described their experiences. And I was one of those "management" guys who had to sit in county board hearings and I got to hear, elected officials call me a liar, call me a self interested cheat, call me over paid and under performing stating that I was lucky to even have a job that I could put 50-60 hours a week in at.
Of course, it wasn't me personally because they knew me. They said that to a number of us "managers". It was those other guys. Just because we said Upper Management is full of overpaid liars and cheats, that wasn't YOU GUYS. YOU'RE OKAY.
Right, like if I were to say..."THOSE BLACKS, THOSE LATINO'S, THOSE JEWS", but not you guys. You're Okay. Don't take it personally, it's just politics.
Some of you know about that internal dialogue that starts going and how you get one of those blank faces or one of those smiles that masks as much as possible the fact that inside you're going, but I AM one of those guys.
So here's a little secret that most people who have worked with me for years don't know. I don't usually say it and most of the times when the issue comes up, I avoid talking about it but right now I'm going to let you in on a sort of private thing.
I am, by education and training, a social worker, an MSW who did therapeutic stuff at the very, very beginning. I was a Licensed Therapist in Kansas before we relocated to Wisconsin. And you know what, I know what motivates people. And no matter who you are, what your social status, income, educational level, sex, race, or religion, there is ONE yin-yan button that if pushed just right, will make you unreasonable, irrational and maybe even a tool of whoever found how to hit that button.
That button can IMMEDIATELY move a person who has little self-control to do the most ghastly and unexplainable behavior you can imagine.
That yin-yang button is HATE and aided by and in close relationship to Fear. If you can be moved to fear or to feel hate, you become almost powerless to control the events that surround you.
You see it all the time. Fear of losing your wife or husband, fear of losing respect in the hood, fear of losing your job - reactions: kill the other person to stop the cheating, deal some drugs and kill the other gang members, drink the fear away.
If you're the Vice President, you can even influence the starting of a war. The movie, KILL BILL is basically about how hate moves a person.
But back to leadership. What does this have to do with leadership?
It doesn't take a leader to reach to the lowest common denominator of humanity.
It doesn't take a leader to feed the hate and fear that are hidden in every person walking this planet. This veneer of civilization and self control, it can rub off really, really quickly.
Now look at the actions of the JS and hate radio when it comes to the pension issue and the actions of the board when the crisis arose.
Here you would have a classic example of hate generating fear and more hate which lead to more and more expressions of fear and more hate.
Think back over the events and the actions of the leaders in this county and show me the attempts to bring rationality or appeals to the higher good.
Let's go back to the Best Essay part.
Remember, this is a Jewish author who has written about the Holocaust and who was invited to present at group of people who don't believe the Holocaust happened...here is what he said he learned from his discussions with a camp commandant Lola.
"So at the lectern in the grand ballroom on Monday, I (the author, John Sack) spoke about hate. "There are," I said, "eighty-five thousand books about the Holocaust. And none has an honest answer to How could the Germans do it? The people who gave us Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, Alle Menshen warden Bruder, all men become brothers. How could the Germans perpetrate the Holocaust? This mystery, we've got to solve it, or we'll keep havaing genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Zaire. Well," I said, "what I report in An Eye for an Eye is Lola" - the heroine, the commandant of a terrible prison in Gliwitz, Germany - "Lola has solved it. The Jews have solved it. Because in their agony, their despair, their insanity, if you will, they felt they became like the Germans - the Nazis - themselves. And if I had been there," I said, "I'd have become one too, and now I understand why. A lot of Jews, understandably, were full of hate in 1945, they were volcanoes full of red-hot hate. They thought if they spit out the hate at the Germans, then they'd be rid of it.
"No, It doesn't work that way. Let's say I'm in love with someone. I don't tell myself, Uh-oh, I've got inside of me two pounds of love, and if I love her and love her, then I'll use all of my love up - I'd be out of love. No, I understand and we all understand that love is a paradoxical thing, that the more we send out, the more we've got. So why don't we understand that about hate? If we hate, and we act on that hate, we stimulate the saliva glands and we produce a drop and a quarter of it. If we spit that out, then two drops, three, a teaspoon, tablespoon, a Mount Saint Helens. The more we send out, the more we've got, until we are perpetual-motion machines, sending out hate and hate until you've created a holocaust. You don't have to be a German to become like that. You can be a Serb, a Hutu, a Jew - you can be an American. We were the ones in the Philippines; we were the ones in Vietnam....We all have it in us to become like the Nazis. Hate, as Lola discovered, is a muscle, and if we want to be monsters, all we have to do is exercise it. To hate the Germans, to hate the Arabs, to hate the Jews. The longer we exercise it, the bigger it gets, as if every day we curl forty pounds and, far from being worn out, in time we are curling fifty, sixty, we are the Mr. Universe of Hate, the Heinrich Himmler. We all can be hate-full people, hateful people. We can destroy the people we hate, maybe, but we will surely destroy ourselves.">
For me, this section opened up a whole new picture of how events, in the County during the pension could be seen. For almost 18 months, Since January 6, 2001, I had been trying to understand the events and this was one of the lights that provided a new perspective on that circus.
Hate is a muscle and the more you exercise it, the stronger it grows. And the bigger its appetite becomes, until hate consumes you and fills your life.
So is it so odd that our country is so afraid and so filled with hate? Or leaders, our media have been filling our lives with it for some time.
But it still didn't explain the leadership issue. What happened?
I wanted to know what happened to create this void of willingness or ability to lead everyone out of that mess.
I thought about it a lot in Arkansas. Finally, I emailed a friend - well she considers me a former parishioner but I'm a heathen and I don't consider myself in that "parishioner" category.
In the history of our exchanges, we touched on a couple of topics, finding your calling and what is a ministry.
First she recommended: Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer who just happens to live in Madison Wisconsin.
In it I found the answer to what a leader ultimately does. And it ties so well to the first piece on hate. It's so simple but if you look at any leader in any situation with this perspective, you can come to some understanding of their true nature, and then you can make a rational decision regarding your actions. I would encourage you to see your own actions in this framework.
"A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light into some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there.
"A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell.
"A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.""
So leaders can work to bring light to those who lives they influence or they can bring darkness.
I came to see the leadership of the JS and all the talk shows and even some of those folks on the County board as bring darkness into people's lives and encouraging the hate or feeding the feeling of fear and mistrust.
And during out exchanges we talked about ministries and what a ministry is and then I found "The World According to Mister Rogers".
Mr. Rogers was a great man, an incarnation of the Buddha of compassion, he should probably be named a saint if protestants had new saints.
"A ministry does not have to be through a church or even through ordination and I think we can all minister to others in this world by being compassionate and caring."">
Ministries aren't just faith things, they aren't just teaching dogma. It's everything and anything you do. Anything you do repeatedly and with conviction is a ministry.
So what is the ministry of today's leaders?
Are they feeding the light or giving way to the darkness?
Hate is real, it surrounds you and fills your ears if you become sensitive to it. And you know that it doesn't go away, it grows and is fed with fear.
It maybe hard to understand but you have a choice in every action that you do, even those you don't want to do like downsizing or eliminating positions or firing someone.
How you approach an issue, how you bring it forward into action hopefully with compassion, acceptance, tenderness and openness of possibility you can bring light or you lead to darkness and despair.
And you know that a ministry is anything you do with conviction and energy. So you can make a ministry with your leadership, you can make a ministry from your actions to bring light and grace into your workplace and from your workplace, to your neighborhood and from your neighborhood into the city and out from there until it reaches beyond your home into every home.
Now before I end I do need to complete a couple of Gestalts. It's a therapist thing.
As I said, I'm a heathen, but for some reason the powers that be placed me with a leader who, probably without knowing it, operates in the light that Palmer is talking about.
With this person, I became more enlightened regarding myself and the options of light that surround me. I was blessed in this gift and I know that when I die, I will be told by the powers that be it was only with this person's generosity and example that I warranted any chance of salvation.
My path could have been quite different. I will pray that in your life you have this blessing or better yet, you become this blessing to someone else.
Finally, I know Gary Dobbert. He was not a close friend but he was fellow soldier in balancing the needs of citizens with the demands of his BOSSES. I would say that I am one of about 20-30 non-elected people who knows or has some idea of what happened and I can say this.
Gary Dobbert did nothing wrong. He did not deserve the hate and vile things said about him from both strangers and from his former work-mates. Dobbert did nothing that should have resulted in the miscarriage of justice that took place.
I was, I am now and I will always be proud of working with him. I know that time will show him in very, very different light than what has been described by the LEADERS in this county.
I would ask you to take the time to drop him card of compassion, let you be a light after his dark, dark journey.
I can assure you, those LEADERS who turned to him for help and money almost everyday of his life before the pension issue, won't take that time.
Thank you. Go with peace and blessings. Congratulations.