The.American.Word.

Vying for media attention these days, often neck-and-neck, we find the public self-immolation of actor Charlie Sheen and what seems to be a genuine people’s revolution in Libya.

The modern American revolutionary Abbie Hoffman, upon returning from a decade of living underground – mostly in northern New York State, where he worked as a cook – and taking back up his public role as gadfly and pot-stirrer, remarked that “you can’t be a revolutionary in America without watching a lot of TV. That’s where America lives.”

This was certainly truer when Hoffman spoke these works, when most cities had a dozen channels for viewers to choose among, and the “Big Three” networks were minting money through their media oligopoly. Times are certainly different, but the two sides of the Sheen/Libya coin suggest that the mainstream media are either appealing at once to two remarkably divergent publics, or that thoughtful people have an appetite for compelling if ultimately trivial self-destructive behavior, while the consumers of mindless drivel also care to at least some tiny degree about democracy, human aspiration, and the fate of the world.

If Sheen is a minor Greek god caught mid-fall from Olympus, Libya is the famine or the war taking place closer at hand to the Greek demos. The real and the unreal. The fantastic and the mundane. The distracting and the truly horrifying. We are entertained with the worst kind of voyeuristic circus. And we are offered a glimpse of history’s propulsive force, of human dignity fighting for its life. We seem, as a society to want both stories to be told to us in more or less the place, at more or less the same time.

We seem – as a culture – unable take only part of the sphere of stories that arches over us. Yet each of us can choose to stand closer to this fragment, this figment, this corner of the story-telling world, than that one. We can fight our way over to the meaning of sacrifice, revolution and hope, and claim that bit of space, or we can be buffeted from here to there, be fed the news others want to feed us.

Our choice is not so much which battle to fight, but which battle to watch.

Trivial as that might seem, it’s a choice that matters.

Let’s remember now in the late winter of the season of revolt in North Africa and the Middle East that a few months ago, Tunisia was the first nation to Tweet and Facebook its way to a new era, the fruit of its rebellion grown by the bit and by the byte, by the tweet and by the post.

Today a Tunisian named Heny tweeted this: “To the Kasbah, young Tunisians! The revolution needs us! Free Tunisia from the remainders of the corrupt regime. The achievement is not complete yet.”

As Americans, we find a special appeal in the idea of an unfinished revolution. We remember that we were not even truly free of the British until 1812, their forts and soldiers scattered till then across our country with little regard to American sovereignty.

Indeed, not until 1865 did we end the legal institutions of human slavery within our democracy. And it was not until 1971 that the sheriff in Yazoo City, Mississippi ended his practice of personally escorting black students brave enough to show their faces at once-upon-a-time white schools off to their more expected places at the shacks and shanties reserved for African American education. (Writer Willie Morris tells that tale fully and well in his book Yazoo – written well before his opus, My Dog Skip).

What we see and what we learn today from North Africa and the Middle East are very much about our own national influence, to say nothing of our own national soul. We have a past in this country – both bloody and beautiful, full of promise yet still incomplete in its vision of what American ought to be – that we cannot afford to forget or neglect, particularly when we see its echoes resounding across the world.

William is my dog. By all customary and conventional measures, Willy is not a nice dog. He is not a dog you would encourage your children to entertain. But I love him. Willy is a sad, mad dog because he cannot forget the abuses of his early doghood before his rescue.

We, like our dogs, are creatures of habit. Up to a certain degree, we nonetheless learn new tricks. Now, Willy, whose nipping victims run into double digits, has no Kaizen ambitions. But the rest of us want to learn and grow, pursue our personal and professional program of continuous improvement, even “reinvention.” Industries and organizations also develop habits, biases and precious assumptions. We talk a good deal about reinvention, but breaking up with habits is hard to do.

And here is the conundrum. Large transformational endeavors, building new and different capabilities for emergent challenges, investing in expansive skill-sets are vital but learning is always easier than forgetting. As de Toqueville lamented for the post- revolution French aristocrats “Ils n’ont rien appris de rien oublier.” They have learnt nothing because they have forgotten nothing. He implies, and surely this is also true of organizational behavior, that what you decide to relinquish and jettison can be more vital to learning and reinvention than what you try to embed as new practice.

Every Sunday, I walk my dogs in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West. We make our familiar circuit. The parallel of strategy and budget cycles in large organizations springs to mind. There’s some unpredictability. At what point in the process will one be called upon to perform the scoop, conceal and dispose ritual. The corporate analogy abides.

It was a light-winded lucid September morning. I decided to take the road less traveled. Prospect Park is the sibling of Manhattan’s Central Park and married less well. The Manhattan match, despite difficult patches, has been more generous than the Brooklyn liaison. Prospect Park offers up her memories in dilapidated corners and dejected masonry. But we love her. So I broke my habit, to momentary canine confusion, and wandered into a quiet lakeside trail. I was thinking of Emerson, although this was no Walden Pond, of de Tocqueville, although this was no Grand Tour, and of what to make for lunch – although I rarely cook on Sundays, I like to live the fantasy. “My gift of fantasy” Einstein asserted, was more valuable than intellect. Disingenuous or not, the recognition that “genius” is sparked at the intersection of imagination and intellect is increasingly relevant to corporations seeking to innovate.

At a more prosaic intersection Willy (a.k.a. “Satan’s puppy”) slipped his leash. Now I’m thinking of the nip-vulnerable ankles of unsuspecting birdwatchers. Since William is about 170 in human years, the sprint was bursty and brief. This is when we came upon it. Ambergill: “The Lost and Found Fountain.”

The funny thing about people is our tenacious adherence to the creed of knowledge. The funny thing about organizations is their tenacious adherence to the creed of experience. We are what we know and we are the sum of what we’ve done. These conventions hold that future action and capacity can be extrapolated from this instant summation of the person. This is a seemingly irresistible thesis and encouraging in its confidence that tomorrow will be just like today; that tomorrow’s business, social, political, cultural needs can be met by yesterday’s experts. You would have to be barking mad to buy that.

Numerous surveys whose responses are inevitably imbued with the gravitas and authority of the surveyor: McKinsey, Booz Allen, The Economist etc. (that not even remotely, motley crew) exhort us consistently to innovate, to jettison received opinion, to question and create (to slip our leash). Change has changed in velocity and scale. So too must we, or we’ll be left behind. We can avail ourselves of processes to smooth the transition. The sticking point is that ex ante crisis, few businesses and even fewer successful people perceive their “core competence” as bathwater rather than baby. Faced with corporate infanticide, best to puncture the tub so the assumptions and practices of others can seep incrementally away without danger to our baby. Hell, Sartre may have concluded, had he ever had a “real” job, is other people’s habits.

My first question in assessing the innovation ambitions of any business is always “What would you never change?” This is as economic as existential as diagnoses get.

Having caught up with the capricious canine, I paused. Pausing is underrated as an action. I recommend it. I read the story on the Prospect Park Alliance guide. Ambergill was lost, literally. The waterfall had been swallowed up in the overgrowth and had disappeared for decades until its very existence was forgotten.

Imagining that which does not yet exist is the creative gymnastic that catapults innovation. When Frederick Law Olmstead, possibly the innovator of landscape architecture, and Calvert Vaux conceived and designed Prospect Park following their landmark creation Manhattan’s Central Park, the traces of the Civil War battles had not yet disappeared.

Men and boys died on the rocks and soil where this then suburban nature-scape would be. Envisioning a park out of a battlefield epitomizes transformational change.

A (civil) army of immigrant workers would hand- dig the expanse of lake, little imagining that a century after them this exquisite man-made sanctuary would be the hub of a jogging loop and that spitting, swearing men in Lycra on titanium bikes would hurtle past both battle memorials and botanical beauty unaware.

The architects did not imagine themselves in the business of transience. Projects of such ambition and scale went from good to great. A celebration of a high-growth, vibrant economy. Absorbed with our currently successful core businesses, we rarely anticipate stagnation and irrelevance. The architects could not have envisioned that urban decline and financial strife would cause Ambergill to be taken back by nature and quietly disappear.

Great design and bold intent (and the conflation of the two) do not expect obsolescence and evaporation. These are built to last. Alpha leaders of any pack must exude confidence in continuity. But the tendrils of change insinuate their way in, at first subtly, then more aggressively until it is too late. We just don’t see it coming.

William was retrieved quickly, this time. Ambergill slowly. The important feature of Ambergill’s rediscovery is that it was an accident, a lucky coincidence of another investigation. If we keep open to accident and re-discovery, we can actually systematically find new insights from apparently unrelated sources. Just because the fountain was not new does not mean its recovery was not discovery. There is innovation inside the box, if we probe and question.

That is the innovator’s, designer’s, searcher’s, investigator’s business. We form unlikely and improbable relationships with bad ideas; then forge a powerful idea from that union. We create synthetic patterns and then step outside of them, exploring another track. We get lost and see what that experience reveals. We let go of what we know in favor or what we might discover. We never cease to be surprised.

Global Voices Online remains an essential source for the ideas and real-time testimony of citizens and others on the inside of political change around the world.

We recommend a visit to http://globalvoicesonline.org

Today the site features stories of protests in China, Iran and Pakistan, all tied to the profound victories won by protesters in Egypt.

What Egypt now means for these countries and their leaders is an open question, but it is being rapidly answered.

What it means for the U.S. is less clear though also vital.

Our sense: less power for the extremes and the polarizers, more for the thoughtful middle.

Note that the events in Egypt were driven by a citizen-body of democratic centrists, friendly to the military and successful at keeping religious and revolutionary extremes out of the mainstream of their protests.

Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther party leader in Chicago, upon being elected to the U.S. Congress in the early 1990’s notably said that “the only difference between my views then and my views now is that back then I thought that the number one thing the average black man wanted was revolution, while now I realize that all along what the average black man has wanted most is decent work and a quiet home.” In some places this may well require a revolution, but revolution itself is never the point – something we may all come to understand more deeply in coming weeks and months.

In 1954, about 100,000 people lived in Montgomery, Alabama. Boston was home to more than 800,000. Philadelphia, more than two million. New York City, about eight million.

That year, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fiancée Coretta Scott looked back to the South from their temporary homes in Boston. They also looked to Philadelphia and to New York, where King was engaged to preach as a visiting minister during the months he was seeking his first pulpit. His graduate work was almost complete, and his profile was a sharp one among the small number of university-educated African-American ministers looking to make their mark.
King was a product of Atlanta, where his father was a notable minister and senior member of the city’s African American establishment. Certainly King had felt the racism of the American South first-hand, but Atlanta was a city he understood, and a city where, moving mostly within the black community as he grew up, he had the advantages of a known and respected family entrenched in the largely self-contained, prosperous black middle class.

Coretta Scott was born in a different South – – not the big city South, not the South of black ministers in new cars and black businessmen with money to spend. She was born in the small town of Heiberger, Alabama, and knew the brutalities of the deep and local South. Her family owned land, but lived a modest life and depended on the good will of white people whose economic interests often ran counter to the Scott family’s well being. Her father was a dirt farmer, but he also ran a trucking business, and made enough money for Coretta Scott to contemplate attending college in the North. She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (on full scholarship) and facing her likely career as a teacher, she chose instead the unlikely life of a professional singer and went to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King.

They were married on the Scott family farm as King was considering the options before him: go North to a pulpit; seek a college teaching job; or take a pulpit in the South. In the South there would be many options for a talented Northern-educated African American preacher. But, outside of Atlanta, the South would be a different world. And for Coretta Scott King, there would be no professional life in music; simply none. Her consolation, as she raised her children in the world of Jim Crow which she knew well – – and had, she thought, abandoned for good when she went North – – would be singing in church.

Upon his first visit to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Montgomery, Alabama church that turned out to be King’s first pulpit, he found a church organ in disrepair. “We had a letter yesterday from the St. Louis company,” the Dexter Avenue church clerk wrote to King as he was negotiating his employment agreement, “indicating that a man will be coming in from Atlanta on Monday to dismantle the old instrument,” a hopeful sign that a new church organ would eventually arrive. He found the parsonage bare of furniture (the first of his three conditions for taking the job was “That the parsonage will be completely furnished”). And he found a church with plenty of need for a preacher – – perhaps too much. On his second visit to meet with the pulpit committee as a finalist for the job, King was told “there is also a possibility that we may wish to have you baptize about five candidates either at the morning hour or at an evening service which we could plan.”

And a friend who knew the church encouraged him to take the job with this left-handed praise of the congregation: “Take it from me, that is a Great Church, Mike. Much honor will go to the man who gets it. Frankly, I have fallen in love with those people. Don’t let anybody tell you that that church is such a hell raiser!”

No doubt Coretta was warmly received as the new preacher’s wife, but her life in Montgomery would be far from the freedoms of North, far from the musical stage, and far from the independence of her few years in Boston. She would be going to a church with a bad organ, in a town with a rough racist reputation, to a home with no furniture, to live in the shadow of her husband the minister, as well as the shadow of her husband’s notable Southern church family. “Wonder if Alberta would not like to come down with you,” wrote the church clerk to King as he planned to travel down from Boston to deliver a guest sermon. The clerk was speaking of Alberta King, Martin Luther King’s mother. “Tell her we would be very happy to have her if she could make it. Let me know when to expect you and whether or not your wife will accompany you.” Someone else, apparently, would have to tell Coretta that the leaders of Dexter Avenue would be very happy to have her if she could make it.

King describes his decision to go South in his book Stride Towards Freedom: Coretta, he wrote, “was hesitant about returning south. We discussed the all-important question of raising children in the bonds of segregation. We reviewed our own growth in the South, and the many advantages that we had been deprived of as a result of segregation. The question of my wife’s musical career came up. She was certain that a Northern city would afford a greater opportunity for continued study than any city in the deep South. For several days we talked and thought and prayed over each of these matters. Finally we agreed that, in spite of the disadvantages and inevitable sacrifices, our greatest service could be rendered in our native South. We came to the conclusion that we had something of a moral obligation to return-at least for a few years.”

The King couple did more than return South – – they went local. They went to a city small enough that America was in some ways a distant place. They went to a town of 100,000 where white men who killed black men or raped white women did not go to jail. Where black men in jail were taken out to prison farms to stand in shackles and work the soil while white sheriff’s deputies stood over them with shotguns. Where, as a matter of law, white people and black people could not sit together on public busses, or eat together at local restaurants, or drink from the same public water fountains. Where the rights of black people were unacknowledged by the local agents of the law, and where, beyond the local, there was little law to be found. King’s words in Stride Toward Freedom about the decision to go South and to go local might sound a bit glib or self-congratulatory, but without a doubt Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King were giving up a great deal in moving from Boston to Montgomery.

Coretta was giving up her prospects as a professional musician, and accepting the obscurity of, at best, a church choir. And both were giving up the sense of public space that many citizens feel in big cities, the sense of being at the center of American culture, and accepting in its place the obscurity of places other Americans don’t know about, and for the most part don’t care about. They were going from a brightly lit life to a place with more shadows than light for educated young African American people. By going local, they were going far from their homes in Boston and far from King’s family home of Atlanta, with the hope of doing some good.