Tough Love and Life Long Learning

Posted by LK on 3/10/08 • Categorized as Education, Politics

A self-aware politician (unfortunately all too often an oxymoron) knows that one of, if not the most difficult task faced by a candidate is to tell the voters a truth that might ultimately benefit them that they don’t necessarily want to hear right now. Tough love during hard times doesn’t play well with the electorate.

Life long learning is a reality and necessity facing all of us in the 21st century. That said, it’s not easy telling a 48 year old factory worker who’s already put in his or her 25 that without new skills there’s no new paycheck. This country got fat on distractions during the last 30 years, and those distractions increased in intensity as bubbles were inflated (think stock market and housing) and then burst by sledgehammers swung by Paul Bunyan types. A lot of people whose parents stayed at one company for life and were rewarded with sweet pensions and life long health care are finding that these days the rewards are quick fix buyouts and a do not re-enter sign.

Taking the time and making the effort to learn new skills seems like an imposition when one was operating under the ingrained assumption that a valued skill of today would be a valued skill of tomorrow. Finding out that today’s operating manual is tomorrow’s buggy whip stings something fierce, and can provoke anything from visceral anger to catatonia.

So when a working class that wasn’t kept up to speed on the pace of change in the world at large finds itself needing to play catch up, there’s a lot of fingers being pointed, whether it’s at fat cat executives, greedy health care companies, free trade agreements and the rest of the usual suspects, some of which are, no question, guilty as charged, and some of which, like the above mentioned free trade agreements, are scape-goated and Shanghaied (that in itself is worth a future piece of its own).

And this brings us back to the politicians who, as almost all strategists will tell you under the duress of a few cocktails, will certainly doom their campaigns by pulling the truth instead of a rabbit out of a hat for an audience that came to see a magic show.

Real change is telling the hard to swallow but productive truth to folks who are initially resistant to it, like a kid who doesn’t like the 10 seconds or so it would take him to down his medicine followed by an ice water chaser. If the American people are as enterprising and resilient as we claim to be, we may go through a brief mourning period for the good old days of a couple of years ago, but then we’ll take our earplugs out and face the music, even if it’s no longer in a key where all the notes are comfortably within our range. We’ll learn to carry a new tune.

To carry the music metaphor a bit further, if vocalists as diverse as Prince and Tony Bennett can adapt, evolve, and thrive, then so can the rest of us. I don’t want to argue Darwinism right now, but only a fool can dispute that we’re in a survival of the fittest zone. And life long learning is the survival tool.

The first presidential candidate to muster up the moxy required to deliver this message may initially receive a blast of enmity in return, but eventually just might feel a little love in the form of a ballot cast their way in return for their courage.