Change?

This month in this country we are going to witness a great momentous occasion. As a country we will swear in a man of a different ethnic origins than the tradition president has been. This will be the culmination of a struggle to change people’s ideas of what constitutes an American that has taken almost fifty years. Through out human existence two things have always been a constant. One is that human thought will mature and change. Two, is that many humans and many institutions will arise to resist that change and therefore slowing the new thoughts acceptance in society as a whole. Indeed even as Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,  it is difficult it is for people to change and people are resistant to change.

Among the leading institutions that are resistant to change are the religious institutions that permeate all societies.  These institutions are so completely resistant to change that often they maintain their dogma until this dogma causes the institution itself to wither and die. Often the older religious institutions don’t completely die off they just wane until they are unique pictures of past thought.

A second resistant institution of change is government itself. While the halls of government are many times populated brilliant forward thinking people, the engine of government is filled with narrow thinking bureaucrats whose main purpose in life is to ensure there personal place. To attain this they make sure that all change is resisted and discarded. The older the government is, the larger and more entrenched the bureaucracy becomes until that government stagnates.

I was a teacher for 35 years and I was proud to be on the first staff of the new school I opened. We were a shining light and people came from all over this country to see how we presented our curriculum. Young and competent teacher would apply to be on the faculty of this school and parents would line up early to make sure their child became students at our school.

I taught special education at this school for the first seven years. By the end of the seventh year I burned out as a special education teacher and took advantage of an opening that occurred that year. When the school was eight years old, I started teaching language and history. By that time the culture was set and I was seen as an outsider (special education teacher are mostly seen that way).  The real problem was that this established bureaucracy in the school had taken hold and innovation of any kind became discouraged. The same people remain in charge for the next twenty years. Consequently, the wonderful start the school had atrophied and slowly but at a quickening pace the student population of the school began the shrink. As principals changed, they would sometime try and change the schools culture but was largely unsuccessful even when they knew that the people in leadership positions were the ones causing this stagnation

What does this have to do with Obama being inaugurated the 20^th of this month? Well he promised us change. He will have to fight a more established bureaucracy than the one I just talked about in my old school. We people should be holding his feet to the fire about this change. We can see already that his appointments are mostly rethreaded Clinton people. This doesn’t seem much like change to me. He’s already modified some of his campaign promises. We all know that compromise is what makes government function. It doesn’t take much of a genius to see that he’s choosing function at the expense of innovation and tradition over redesign.

 

I hope that Obama is successful and that we as country are able to see our way out of this mess we’re currently embroiled. Perhaps his choices are meant to bring back competence in government. It a sure thing that after these last eight years we badly are in need of a competent government. Then I hope that he will start working on the reforms he promised us. For what its worth I’m keeping my eye peeled.