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The End of the Beginning

Monday Jan 02 2012

By Jim Selman Bio 

Ah, January 1st, the new beginning and a chance to finally get it right this year. Or is it?

Perhaps it is the End of the Beginning. When we began as a nation, we were full of hope and idealism. We believed that every person could thrive and prosper if they worked hard and learned from their past mistakes.

Today, can we honestly say we believe that hard work will take us in the direction of our dreams? What happened to us? Where are we going?

[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action

Tagged with: beliefs commitment democracy new year

The 3 Rs of Citizenship

Wednesday Aug 11 2010

By Jim Selman | Bio
When I was growing up, you needed to be master the 3 Rs (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) in order to be educated. Today we need to master a new 3 set of ‘Rs’: Rights, Rewards and Responsibilities. When I first started traveling to other countries in the 1970s, the conversation about the USA was always in a context of respect and even admiration—even when criticizing certain aspects. But for the last 10 years or so, I have noticed that the conversations are changing. Fewer people are envious of who we are and our way of life. More and more see us as recalcitrant, self-centered, parochial and unable to recover whatever it was that made us great in the post-WWII years. Most people across the globe have access to the same newspapers, the same media channels and the same websites that we do. The prevailing and unavoidable conclusion being touted from many of these sources: governance in the USA is a mess![Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action

Tagged with: 9/11 american_people democracy first_amendment ground_zero_mosque responsibilities rewards rights

12-Step Program for America: Step 4

Tuesday Mar 23 2010

   By Jim Selman | Bio
Read the rest of the 12-Step Program > Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

We’ve been drawing an analogy between the state of affairs in the governance of our country and the various kinds of addictive conditions we face as individuals. Specifically, we’ve been saying the ‘system’ is broken, we’re out of control and we need to find something larger than the political gridlock driven by special and self-interest groups we’re witnessing in Washington. In watching the final hours of the healthcare debate, I was heartened when

[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action

Tagged with: 12_step argentina canada democracy democrat healthcare_debate honesty reconciliation recovery republican south_africa truth

12-Step Program for America: Step 1

Monday Mar 01 2010

By Jim Selman | Bio
I work with organizations that are attempting to change. At the beginning of working with a new client, I point out what’s missing for any organization that has recurring or seemingly intractable problems: what’s missing is a different way of observing. Whether we’re talking about a company, a community or a continent, a new perspective always gives us an opening to create new possibilities, have new choices and take new actions: a new way of observing the world effectively gives us a different future than some variation of ‘more of the same’. We need to stop asking what the problems are and start asking why they persist. When we do, we begin to realize that we have a paradigm problem. Until we deal with that, none of our seemingly intractable problems—from staggering debt to unending war, climate change to the underlying causes of the mortgage crises—can be solved. Albert Einstein expressed this concisely when he said that sometimes our problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action

Tagged with: 12-step addiction america cause choice common conservatives constitution constitutional control declaration democracy freedom independence liberals of paradigm problem program step vision

Is This the End of Democracy?

Friday Aug 14 2009

By Jim Selman | Bio
Future historians may mark the first decade of the 21st century as the time when democracy died. And if they do, they will say that democracy died because people became so resigned and afraid that they retreated into closed and cloistered communities motivated by self-interest, ideological fervor and ignorance. History will note that what began as honest differences grew into an irreconcilable fragmentation of the body politic.[Read More]

Written by eldering at The Great Turning
Join discussion COMMENTS [3]

Tagged with: barack_obama democracy extremists health_care_reform

G-20, Gee Whiz

Wednesday Apr 08 2009

   By Jim Selman | Bio
I am not an economist and I don’t know what to think about all the ‘unprecedented’ claims coming from the joint communiqué of the G-20 summit. I hope it works. But, hey, a trillion isn’t what it used to be! As a guy who has been around enough to be a little bit wary of political claims of bright horizons, I wonder if the world’s leaders are really united to correct past excesses and grease the financial system enough to restore confidence in the future. After all, isn’t that what this is really about?[Read More]

Written by eldering at Leadership

Tagged with: commitment democracy g-20 leadership media

The Election

Monday Nov 03 2008

   By Jim Selman | Bio
One more day and we’ll know for sure who will be our President. If we accept the polls, it looks like a slam-dunk for Obama. (I already voted for him.) But even should there be a miracle for McCain, the nation faces a moment of truth unlike any time that I can recall’—at least not since the end of the Civil War. I am talking about how we get beyond the LEFT versus RIGHT schism that has divided and fragmented our nation and made a mockery of what we used to say in the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ when we declared ourselves to be “One Nation Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All”.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Leadership

Tagged with: commitment democracy integrity leadership mccain obama responsibility

The World We Want: The Power of Authentic Stories

Tuesday Jun 17 2008

By David Korten | Great Turning website

Read more posts in The World We Want series.

Profound social change takes place when an important cultural story changes—and the impetus to challenge imperial rule rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire. Democracy took hold when we replaced the story of the divine right of kings with the story that the powers of government derive from the will of the people. People of color and women won recognition of their full human rights only as the civil rights and women’s movements successfully exposed the fallacy of the story that people of color and women are less than fully human. Recognizing the full humanity of all peoples opens us to a deeper understanding of what it truly does mean to be human in all the rich potentials that our human nature embodies.[Read More]

Written by eldering at The Great Turning

Tagged with: authentic democracy earth_community great_turning social_change

The World We Want: The Big Picture III

Tuesday May 20 2008

By David Korten | Great Turning website

Read more posts in The World We Want series.

This brings us to the third element of the big picture of the human confrontation with the limits of our Mother Earth: the governing institutions to which we give the power to set our priorities and our collective course. We might wonder how such injustice could happen in a world governed by democratically elected governments. The answer is simple and alarming.[Read More]

Written by eldering at The Great Turning

Tagged with: community democracy environment government justice sustainability

Growing Older—A Team Sport

Friday Jan 04 2008

Tom Brokaw in a recent AARP op-ed piece pointed to the obvious fact that as the Boomers retire they’re going to change our social and economic reality in profound ways. Lots of others are predicting the coming crunch associated with questions of how to pay astronomical healthcare and Social Security costs with a shrinking workforce and tax base. Consider that about 4 or 5 of us have supported one retiree over the course of most of our career. When we retire, a couple of our offspring will be supporting us—as well as paying additional costs for energy, security and cleaning up and protecting the environment. You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to realize that something doesn’t add up.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]

Tagged with: choice commitment democracy freedom future retirement

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