We have met the enemy, and he is us….

In Healing Our Divided Society, the Eisenhower Foundation’s book detailing its efforts to assess our country’s progress with addressing the issues that led to the profound unrest and civil disturbances of the 1960s especially as encapsulated in the Kerner Report and the subsequent work of the Violence Commission, the editors note that “This is not another study. It is a call to action. We know what works. Now, we must build the will to do it.”

And yet we find ourselves amidst a new global and largely peaceful protest movement sparked by the very same causes. Why is it that if we actually do know what works, we haven’t built the will to do it?

It was a very troubled time in our nation’s history when it seemed that our society was literally coming apart at the seams: not only was there growing unrest due to the nation’s increasing engagement in the Vietnam War, but the disaffection and disenfranchisement of the urban poor had made itself known violently in a series of riots in our major cities in the second half of the 1960s. Growing up in Detroit, I remember those times: I lived through our riot in 1967, will forever remember it and was indelibly changed by it.

Yet mainstream America and our governmental leaders were shocked: they just couldn’t understand why our cities literally exploded. Of course they couldn’t: they weren’t really paying attention. Is it any different now?

In response to our societal eruption, in 1967, President Johnson established a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which became known as the Kerner commission after its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. It was task with answering three questions about the riots of that time: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” The next year, a complementary effort was established, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, spurred by the tragic death of Senator Robert F Kennedy. In response to the clear disaffection in large swathes of our national community, the government decided to listen to the people. It didn’t go well.…

The short story is that the Kerner Commission’s report seemed to go “too far and too fast,” in the view of its sponsor, so it was officially rejected. That’s right, because the Commission’s members, both progressives and conservatives, told the truth about the horrible conditions that they had discovered and seen firsthand in their research, their work was rejected, criticized and ignored while its publication engendered a considerable backlash across the country. Whatever the problems were, at that time, we didn’t really want to hear it.

Is it any different now?

As the book’s editors, Senator Fred Harris – the last living member of the Kerner commission – and Alan Curtis, President of the Eisenhower Foundation that continues its work, observed:

The commission reports basic conclusion was that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” “Segregation and poverty,” the report continued, “have created and the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

In other words, institutional, systemic racism is real, pervasive and powerfully destructive, which was true in the 1960s and, sadly, remain so today.

The sad irony in all of this is that, both then and now, we know what the problems have been and are. Pres. Johnson himself, and establishing the Kerner Commission, observed:

“The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack – mounted at every level – upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease not enough jobs. We should attack those problems – not because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America.”

Add to this, as the Commission’s report did, the historical and continuing problem with police brutality, and that pretty much sums up why our society came apart a half-century ago as well as why it’s clearly beginning to fray seriously at the moment. Or, to put a finer point on it, as then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner noted, “we are in deep trouble as a people, and history will not deal kindly with any nation which will not tax itself to cure its miseries.” Indeed.…

Fixing the realities of our fractured society is supremely costly – in terms of time, in terms of willpower and, most assuredly, in terms of money – but so are the costs of failing to do so. And while you may be tempted to say, well, those are social issues with which we in the business community are involved, stop it: if there’s anything that’s been proven conclusively in the past half-century, it’s that the business sector’s ability to lobby and effectively create self-serving legislation is unparalleled in our country’s history.

So let’s keep it real and acknowledge that we businesspeople, individually and collectively, have to play a major role in the restructuring of our society. Let’s further acknowledge that it’s going to cost us something, likely dearly in fact, but that cost is the true reflection of the domestic and international tranquility that we seek in order to pursue our ends. That we’ve been able to get away with meaningfully lessening that burden in recent years is impressive from one perspective, but its actual costs are becoming clearer by the day. No, the business community isn’t primarily to blame for the unsustainable inequality in our society, but it has been a major contributor, which both compels us to acknowledge this as well as to commit to being a meaningful part/driver of the solution.

So what role can and should we play?

One indication of the possibilities available to us is the high-profile acknowledgment by members of the Business Roundtable last year that companies exist not only to produce superior returns for shareholders, but they also have other important constituencies, especially their people and those in the communities that they serve.

Another indication is that, either driven by fear and guilt or by a frank assessment and subsequent change of heart and direction, many leading corporations are pledging both to take Diversity & Inclusion more seriously as well as to invest in organizations of uplift and diverse communities. However we’ve gotten to this point, this is a good thing … if they actually do it.

Another potential avenue is to commit to leadership by example, not only in our organizations but in the community as well. In other words, we have to make this commitment personal.

For example, engage with organizations committed to social justice issues like Diversity & Inclusion, economic inequality and criminal justice reform. Imagine how much more funding these organizations could attract and how much more good they could do if, en masse, influential executives were a core part of their leadership.

Further, since we businesspeople have an outsized influence on our national policy, personally advocate for more economically inclusive legislation and for more equitable governance in our society. Imagine how powerful it would be if the executive class were seen as champions of all rather than a few selfish beneficiaries at the expense of the many.

Finally, consider – and fund – ways that we can increase Financial Literacy in our society. Simply put, as is clear from the yawning, growing and fast-approaching retirement crisis in our country, the average American is woefully undereducated from a financial perspective. Imagine how different and better our country would be if, whether through public education and/or other means, everyone was exposed to and steeped in the principles of personal finance, enabling us to make better/more astute financial decisions in our own interest. Not only would this lessen the burden on our governmental systems, but the increase in well-being would be profound and likely, in the most positive of ways, revolutionary as well.…

The truth is that the road ahead of us is both long and hard … but the cost of our continued failure to address the inequities in our society grows every day. As both President Johnson and the Kerner Commission noted more than a half-century ago, we both know what the problems are as well as many likely solutions. What we lack is the will to address them.

So, to make it plain as my elders used to say, answer these questions for yourself first and then for our society at large:

How many more George Floyds will there have to be before you’re willing to pay this price? How many more Ahmaud Arberys will there have to be before you’re willing to give up a little so that many may have a lot more? How many more lives will have to be lived without any real prospect of the American Dream before you’re willing to acknowledge that ours is a fundamentally unjust and inequitable society in need of reform if not re-imagining?

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re reading this piece via this medium then chances are that if you choose not to engage, your life will be just fine. But I ask you to consider the lives of your children and grandchildren:

What will America be like when they’re your age … and there are tens of millions of Baby Boomers in poverty because they didn’t (know how to) save enough for retirement and Social Security and other components of our social safety net have been cut meaningfully? When we’re a ‘majority minority’ country whose numerically dominant members have experienced consistent disenfranchisement from those whom they now outnumber? When the rise of technology (and AI, etc.) is so complete that literally many if not most of working age are partially or fully economically superfluous?

You see, to me, this is what we’re fighting for: the future will necessarily be more challenging because progress, however beneficial, inevitably comes at a cost and virtually always an appreciable one. So, if we choose not to address the fundamental inequities in our society now, will this make this more challenging future easier or harder to navigate?

It is indeed time to heal our divided society and to address issues that we’ve allowed to plague the many so that the few can enjoy unprecedented ease and tranquility. For if we don’t, the words of former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz will prove prophetic: “the Kerner report can be summarized in the words of that great American philosopher, Pogo, who said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us!’”

(Photo credits: https://www.facebook.com/ThePeaceAlliance/photos/a.419437666672.191101.181024686672/10152517861896673/?type=3&theater; https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Our-Divided-Society-Investing/dp/1439916039; https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=187&t=1110; https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-haunting-prediction-in-kerner.html; https://time.com/5846727/george-floyd-protests-history/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiSm0Nuqomg; https://theconversation.com/brands-backing-black-lives-matter-it-might-be-a-marketing-ploy-but-it-also-shows-leadership-139874; https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/01/21/apple-giving-program-365-million-use/; https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/theodore_roosevelt_109913?img=3&src=t_work; https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/frederick_douglass_377775; https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/)