We have been through a hard 10 years. They were not, as some have argued, the worst ever, or even the worst of the past century. The ’30s started with the Great Depression, featured the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and ended with World War II. That’s a bad decade for you. In the ’60s we saw our leaders assassinated, our great cities hit by riots, a war tear our country apart.
But the ‘OOs were hard, starting with a disputed presidential election, moving on to the shocked pain of 9/11, marked by an effort to absorb the fact that we had entered the age of terror, and ending with a historic, world-shaking economic crash.
Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: “They forgot the mission.” So many great American institutions””institutions that every day help hold us together””acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it’s the one you’re part of.
[blockquote]Name the institution and you will probably see a diminished sense of mission, or one that has disappeared or is disappearing. Journalism too the past decade—longer—has had trouble remembering why it exists, which is to meet a real and crucial public need for reliable information about the world we live in. It’s the job of journalists to find the news, to get it in spite of the myriad forces arrayed against getting your hands on it, to report it clearly and honestly.
And as all these institutions forgot their mission, they entered the empire of spin. They turned more and more attention, resources and effort to the public perception of their institution, and not to the reality of it…
So what to do? Here my friend the lawyer’s stoicism and mindless optimism might come in handy, for turning around institutions is a huge, long and uphill fight. It probably begins with taking the one thing we all hate to take in our society, and that is personal responsibility.
If you work in a great institution: Do you remember the mission? Do you remember why you went to work there, what you meant to do, what the institution meant to you when you viewed it from the outside, years ago, and hoped to become part of it? [/blockquote]
This is an excellent essay; when she writes “institution” read (for those of us still in it) “The Episcopal Church”. Thanks, Kendall. I had missed this in my rss feed from WSJ
[blockquote] They’d crater companies, parachute out, and brag about it later. [/blockquote]
She wrote that about Wall Street types, but boy oh boy does that describe some episcopal antics.
But more on point, the article was a salutary call to penitence. If we all can look to our neglected or abandoned missions, we’ll perhaps work against the polarization that flows from self-righteous blaming.
I’m also thankful for Maxwell Perkins – had he not dissuaded Thomas Wolfe from the title “Look Ahead With Stoicism,” few of us would have enjoyed Wolfe’s amazing craft.