October, 2001

The recent events in New York and Washington suggest, indeed insist upon, a new paradigm in our response to world events and politics. This sea change won't be arrived at quickly, they never are but it's inevitable. The rules have changed forever.

Consider these realities:

1) Our military, the greatest force the world has seen to date, virtually unopposed by any credible enemy, is impotent to defeat a determined and scattered terrorist web. It denies this, but the fact is that as currently configured, our armed forces have only the ability to destroy civilian targets in lieu of an opposing army.

2) Terrorism is the last weapon of the disenfranchised. All terrorist activities, whether or not we agree with their goals, have at least the thread of truth behind their activity.

3) The United States has, for decades, supported terrorists and terrorist activity in the destabilization of foreign governments. We have trained a large portion of the world all too well in this activity and armed them as well.

4) We are the world's largest exporter of armaments. Continuing to pour arms into the hands of opposing political forces can only bring a tyranny of the strong, disenfranchising the weak and closing the circle of terrorism.

There are no answers to this problem in the old power model, no clues to be gotten from the days of great opposing political forces, no key to victory in air superiority or command of the seas. The only ultimate hope for a solution is in narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots, providing aid to people instead of governments, abandoning our own terrorist past and bringing more of the world in from the kitchen to the dining room. Changing the dynamics of who will serve and who will eat.

Henry Ford introduced the five dollar day in a time when many struggled on five dollars a week. He understood that the cars pouring off his miracle assembly lines needed more buyers than the rich could provide, that his workers needed to earn enough to own the cars they built. At that precise moment in our history, the consumer culture was born and America took off economically, continuing to this day to outdistance the world economically. Ford changed the dynamics of who will walk and who will drive.

The world desperately needs a five dollar day. America needs the vision of Henry Ford to pull it off.

Let's get it straight that the desire to live in peace, away from want is not an American anomaly, the love and protection of family not a strange fiction to the rest of the world. "To the victor go the spoils" has given us too proportionally a world without hope for the common man. Not the hope for a three car garage or college for the kids, but hope for food on the table and no one to kick in the door, machine gun in hand. Believe this if you believe nothing else---the Iraqi, Afghan, Indonesian, Sudanese and Moroccan love the smell of fresh bread and the sound of their children's laughter every bit as much as you.

The sweat-shop mills of New England and the slavery of the plantation are long gone failed models of American productivity, a restriction rather than a broadening of middle class values. We've off-shored this model to the have-not nations of the world and it's coming back to bite us in the ankle. The kitchen is getting ever larger and the dining room ever smaller. Our product and profit oriented society must realize that the scraps that fall off the table are not sufficient to sustain the model. A society that was once the envy of the world has lost its footing. We intimidate the world as we once intimidated our mill workers. Ford was chastised by those mill owners, but his choice produced consumers of cars and refrigerators and theirs produced poverty, ignorance and vanished industry. Which is the profit model? Which expands and which contracts? Where lies our future? In an ever more armed, angry and isolated world or in the proven success of Henry Ford's insight?

Do we and will we have the wisdom, in the face of our anger and revenge, to look beyond the event to the cause?

That's a question that will very largely shape the coming century.

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