Ryan's theory and Susan's post yesterday have both left me with a nagging melancholy. Maybe its the weather. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten up this morning. Maybe I'm feeling like a story I heard a long time ago about people riding on a train and they decide they don't like the direction that the train is headed so they all move to the left side of the train. But the train keeps going down the same track. So they all move to the right side of the train. But the train keeps moving down the same track. So they start dividing up and moving, some to the right and some to the left and some standing in the aisle. But the train keeps on keeping on down the same damn track. The point of the story was to talk about visionary leadership. Visionary leadership requires people to get off the train and lay down new track. If we don't like the direction we're headed, sifting back and forth and standing in the middle ain't goin' to get us anywhere but down the same track. The challenge is: how to get off the train and decide on a new direction. If you boil all the Bush arguments and objections and strategies down in a boiling pot they all come out to be the same underneath. FEAR. We should be AFRAID. We should stay on the train, shut up, and trust the conductor. And, they have been successful--progressives haven't. FEAR is a damn powerful motivator and inhibitor to action. Its not just fight or flight, there's also freeze. We're frozen. Stuck. Locked on the train. Pissing and moaning about which side to be on. Where are the visionaries? We have to find an emotion stronger than fear. WHat is it? Hope? Too passive. Anger and indignation? Too negative. Faith? Too ungrounded and unreasonable. Reverence? Pride? Determination? I don't know yet. Progressive means progress, change, evolution, vision. Conservative means, stasis, status quo, or worse yet, the reinstitution of some bygone golden age that was never really all that golden. We have to have a vision that is emotionally compelling and intellectually sound or the game is over. Eat. Drink. And be merry for soon we die. The past can help us not make the same mistakes but the future is tomorrow and it doesn't exist. We have to make it up, today. There was a great program on NPR today with a biologist talking about disease and infection. He argued that we need to get more artists and creative thinkers involved in policy besides the experts who can only see things in the framework of their discipline. He talked about how he saw that using a term like "war" on disease even limited what he saw in the evidence in front of him. Metaphors shape the very information coming into our minds and the thoughts that arise after. Got to run--late for a meeting, but I want off the train. Anybody else? Know any visionaries?