Lack of fortitude, or lack of a voice?

I think part of the problem is that American leadership at all levels has a disturbing lack of confrontational skill. Dissent doesn't necessarily need to be banished; it needs to be confronted and discussed on a public level. That isn't happening. Instead, we get name-calling, influence-peddling and the unspoken hope that maybe the problem will "just go away if we ignore it." Any organized society has to deal with these responses; humans by nature group together and cooperate with each other, or civilizations would never have been built.

Human kind appears to have dealt with unavoidable conflict by selecting leaders that would debate and compromise, but there has always been some sort of baseline--a point beyond which no one would go--to act as a reference. The reference was meant to be a decision point: Do we continue to use diplomacy or do we go to war, for instance. Right now we don't have such a baseline in place; this lack in the business world is what led to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Note how this Act came to be: Professionals in the business world and their regulatory agencies openly discussed a variety of guidelines and debated what the possible outcomes would be, and they did so openly. Our political institutions need to have the concept of organized, moderated debate put back in place to get over some of this reluctance to confront. As for the rest of us, we should practice the fine art of shutting up and listening to the debators.

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