The Courage to Try to Fix Things

CITATION: Harlan Ullman, "Ideas, imagination, innovation needed in Dis-United State of Amerca," UPI, 8 March 2023.

Growing up as a kid in Boscobel WI, I came to recognize a number of sacred items in our house -- like that scary Jesus statue going down the stairs where he's pulling his chest open and revealing a burning heart. Less visually traumatic was a framed portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that featured his signature below a brief note of thanks to my maternal grandfather (Gerald Clifford), who was quite politically active most of his career as a lawyer based in Green Bay WI (he's now in the Packers Hall of Fame, but that is another post).

Anyway, I grew thinking FDR was like a saint and I was never quite sure why until my paternal grandfather (J.E. Barnett) died in the early 1980s and I stood at his wake. All evening long we met these wizened old farmers who came up, shook our hands, and then HAD to tell us about how J.E. went out of his way to save their farm during the Great Depression through various financial tricks (he was a board member on the local bank) and legal maneuvers.

Now, understand, my grandfather J.E. was about as stiff and formal a figure as you could ever met. He would shake my hand every Christmas eve when we came over to dinner and that was it for the year in terms of grandfatherly affection. So, for me to hold hands with these people who simply would not release mine until they had had their say was really eye-opening. J.E. the kind and giving and looking-out-for-the-little-guy? Him I had never met ... until that wake. J.E. was, in my experience, a fairly inflexible, intolerant Republican to the core. I'd watch "It's A Wonderful Life" and I'd see Lionel Barrymore as "Old Man Potter" as coming far closer to J.E.'s persona than Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey.

But, as I found out that night, I was wrong. When things got really tough, Old J.E. (he was born old) was a bit of a fixer for the little guy: a workaround specialist, rule-bender, and -- yes -- even innovator. Desperate times, desperate measures.

This was very much the case also with Jerry Clifford, my other lawyer grandpa. My Mom (also a lawyer like my dad) would tell stories about Jerry hosting, during the Great Depression, striking dairy farmers in his basement -- you know, the guys who were dumping milk on highways to protest government-imposed production limits designed to boost prices. Why he hosted their meetings in his basement and what his role was in their protests remain somewhat unclear. These guys were facing desperate conditions and Jerry was the kind of guy who took charge at moments like that (same thing with the Packers at various crisis points in their history). What I remember most about Mom's story was how she'd have to answer the doorbell when the cops showed up looking for those "troublemakers" and lie right to their faces about how she had no idea where her father was right now.

Like J.E. during the Great Depression, Jerry was willing to try something -- anything -- to help clients out in those tumultuous times.

It was exactly that quality of FDR that made him a sort of patron-saint in my family. His many biographers (my favorite being Conrad Black) have chronicled the man's incredible flexibility when it came to trying out solutions to fix seemingly insoluble problems. He'd try ten things, and when they all or mostly failed, he'd try ten things more. He had the courage to innovate at the worst possible moments, or when everything seemed doomed to stay the horrible way it was.

Per the citation above: Harlan Ullman is a strangely creative thinker. He has come up with several brilliant ideas across his long and distinguished military and think-tank career and one famously controversial one -- shock and awe. I remember Harlan from my days at the Center for Naval Analyses (1990-1998) and this guy was routinely so far out of the box that you couldn't even tell if there was a box in his universe. I still admire that about him.

Like me, Harland is an idea hamster: always spinning in his wheel.

This op-ed of his, jumping around on topics (as he is wont to do) reminded me of that whole courage-to-try-and-fix-things vibe that I always associated with grandfather Jerry Clifford and came belatedly to realize marked Grandpa J.E.'s life as well. People of that time didn't see this as innovation; they saw it as answering the call.

That's what I liked about Harlan's column (and the general mentoring vibe I've felt from a lot of Vietnam vets over my career): that sense of responsibility that we all share for the state of these United States right now. We're in a hole and yet we keep furiously digging, with attempts at innovation despised by so many as threats to our way of life, in addition to being generated by "string-pullers" who got us in this fix in the first place! As a society, we are so passively-aggressive and reflexively vindictive right now: ready to point fingers, assign blame, condemn all who don't agree with you, and -- above all -- demonize anyone offering fixes that prevent us from pursuing our existential struggles with one another.

You know the Star Trek episode I'm thinking about:

America has met these moments in the past, and has always innovated its way out of them. The sense of needing to jumpstart that process is why, I am certain, Harlan wrote this op-ed, and it's why I -- after swearing off books for good a decade ago -- answered Scott Williams ' call to write America's New Map: that sense that I should stop feeling sorry for myself, pick myself up, and start offering solutions.

And I have to say, that's exactly how I pulled myself out of the midlife funk that was my late 2010s: I decided I still give a damn and want to keep trying.

That decision powers every hour of my workday at Throughline, Inc. , and it feels great.