America needs to "Vote Up"

Nov. 4, 2008 - PRLog -- Vote Up


In 1845, a man rode a borrowed horse and wagon into the woods around Concord, Massachusetts to a small cabin he had built on Walden Pond.  There, over the course of a twenty-six-month experiment in living with only the essential things, he wrote a book that would have a profound effect on the hearts and minds of the most consequential leaders of the Twentieth Century, including Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Ghandi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Henry David Thoreau's commitment to nature was, in the end, a commitment to the energies he found outside that cabin on Walden Pond—the energies of truth, beauty, peace, and endurance.  He came to believe that the same energies that were at the heart of nature's magnificence were also the essential foundation for human greatness.

Leaders who lift society and lead civilization to higher ground over long periods of time demonstrate an equally powerful commitment to making universal, civilizing principles the foundation of their work—in fact, the foundation of their very approach to leadership.

Whether one travels to a burgeoning city center in Africa, or to a village in China, or to a café in the streets of Europe, the language of civilization is the same.  Talk to people in rural southern India about justice, peace, beauty, and truth, and their eyes light with the recognition that you have opened a conversation on the qualities that give life worth and meaning and that matter most.

This presidential election season arrives in a time of uncommon gravity.

In the midst of complex difficulties and weighty challenges, including what has been called perhaps the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, it is essential to vote up—to vote for those qualities that we aspire to for the next generation and for the lifting of our own neighborhoods.  It is essential to find a leader who understands that our best hope is in the enduring principles that Thoreau found at Walden and that provide through nature in human beings the seeds of magnificence.  He shared through his writing an understanding that our best leaders will remake the country on the strength of those principles with dimensional leadership that is more sophisticated and more connected to the challenges we face than ever before.

John McCain's captors in North Vietnam offered him his freedom in exchange for truth, and he chose to be tortured and imprisoned to preserve for himself and a nation that part of the American spirit that stands for more than the future of one man, or one brigade, but that stands for honor, freedom, and decency in the face of the worst brutality.

Barack Obama left a certain career path to wealth and stature to organize a people on the south side of Chicago in the type of abandoned and broken urban community where hope and economic freedom can become forgotten human principles.  He traded stature for faith, developing in himself and in a local neighborhood a power that comes from focus, attention, and a rare willingness to reach into the heart of despair, chronic poverty, and violence to find solutions to endemic problems that appear insoluble to any rational thinker.

Leadership is a process that is one part art and one part science.  Ansel Adams, who famously captured through photography the breathtaking beauty of some of this nation's most magnificent climbs, made it his standard protocol to produce hundreds of prints of the same photograph, until he had fully captured the breathtaking spirit of the natural world.  He said of his art:  "There is still something incomprehensible about the photographic process.  The physics of the situation are fearfully complex, but the miracle of the image is a triumph of the imagination.  The most miraculous ritual of all is the combination of machine, mind, and spirit that brings forth images of great power and beauty."

Our nation requires in its time of need an injection of machine, mind, and spirit, like the one Adams describes from his darkroom.  And like Thoreau, we must recognize and embrace the energies of truth, beauty, peace, and endurance in our potential leaders.  It is ours on Tuesday, November 4th to pull the lever and vote up.



J. Kevin Sheehan is the author of A Leader Becomes a Leader:  Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation. He is the founder of Starbucks Hear Music and Executive Director of the Cambridge Housing Assistance Fund.