A bag full of snakes

Kermit the Frog used to sing "It isn´t easy being green." I wonder, is it easy being the President of the United States.

It seems to me that our 44th President, Barack Obama, has inherited a bag full of snakes. They are all wriggling and writhing; jostling to break free and madly trying to poke their venomous heads out of the sack and strike the hand that holds them.

A sack full of these squirming critters is difficult to control. Not only are they hard to hold, but it takes enormous effort to maintain your balance as these long, fat, hissing snakes leap and lunge in the bag.

Rather easily, we could name these snakes. They are unemployment, health care, the crumbling economy, the hubris of Wall Street and mortgage lenders, bail-out bonuses, war on two fronts, our outdated infrastructure, corporate malfeasance, the environment, energy needs and so forth. The list is daunting.

Where does one begin?

We have a President who is focused, productive and willing to handle the bag full of snakes he received on January 20th. God bless him for his cool-headed, intelligent, task-oriented willingness to tackle the problems, one by one, snake by snake. Clearly, he may get bitten but he is not shying away from the issues at hand; he is willing to lead in a very active, take-charge way.

Curiously, a CNN poll reports that most Americans think Obama is doing too much. Further, Obama himself mentioned in a California speech that some pundits had said that going on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and handling the economy would be too much for the President to manage in a single day.

Oh, please! It seems to me that our country is up to its metaphoric neck in slime and sludge. There is real work to be done. Would we want a slow President? Do we want a President in denial?

I thought that we voted for change. I thought we said we were ready for a new perspective. Yet, it seems we are lumbering along in old, familiar patterns. There seems to be a serious lack of bipartisan partnering. There is a lot of rhetoric. There are finger-pointing round-robins, political mud-slinging and media circuses. This same old, same old is exhausting. Wouldn´t you agree?

Our country is in very serious trouble. One only needs to take a look at the writhing bag of spitting snakes to realize that the last eight years certainly did not advance the grace of our forefather´s country. And, in all fairness, the previous administrations, both Dems and Pubs, have their names on those snakes as well. This isn´t a party thing; this is a survival-of-the-country thing. At the risk of sounding dramatic, but in all seriousness, this is a revisioning of America.

Think of the US as one, very large, diverse family. If the family is in trouble, all gather ´round and agree on how to solve the problem. What we have now is lots of bickering at the table. This bickering is wasting time and energy. This bickering is not progress, but more like regression. It offers nothing save old, worn-out words and self-righteous thumping.

We, the people, want responsible and responsive leaders. We are frustrated and angry at the state of the nation. We need creative solutions, shared visions and handshakes across the table, not under the table.

To you, our elected folks in D.C., please get a grip and do the right thing. Stop posturing, and put your good heads together to discover solutions that serve the whole family – and that includes the disenfranchised homeless, hungry, broken and battered.

To you, the less-than-popular corporate leaders, can you take your extraordinary ambition to climb to the top of the ladder and reconfigure it into a principled, wide-angled strategy that serves the world? Business has been around forever. Undoubtedly, in Socrates´ day, there was a man pushing his cart and offering his wares. Today´s world calls for leadership grounded in a win-win approach.

We, the people, need leaders with vision, common sense and a desire to serve the good of the whole. And, we, the people, also need to be the change we want to see in you. We need to construct our lives with vision, common sense and a desire to serve the good of the whole.

We are all connected, like it or not. It is now time to act like it.

Copyright 2009 by Adele Ryan McDowell.