The Empowerment Ventures: PRE-ADMISSIONS TEST FOR JustUS

This episode of The Empowerment Ventures requires a test to proceed. Warriors for peace inspired by Thomas P. M. Barnett need not continue. Those who favor social justice or advocacy and community collaborative approaches to making for a better world, well you can continue if you raise your hand first and swear to think the truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth.

The Helping Sector's New Map: Unrequited Action

(Or maybe: "Dancing Naked for Change")

Okay, now that the audience is as it should be—prejudice from the start against military obsessiveness in the name of the making of a better future—let me start with a simple declaration: the more I read Barnett's work that more pissed off I get.

This man is interesting, entertaining, optimistic and about as confident in his skin as a man on a mission can conceivably get. If you haven't done it yet, go buy The Pentagon's New Map: Blueprint for Action and place it where your Bible or whatever other book you have that sits in that Great "I can't quite get to it right now but will if my after-life depends upon it" space. (If you get inspired or pissed off at all, then try reading the thing.)

Barnett is on track to killing off any hope of there being an alternative to using the US military to pound the world into a sense of peaceful submission.

And he's getting away with it because no one likes to attack this "Oh Shucks" optimist.

Which leaves little room in the future for dyed-in-the-wool optimists for community empowerment strategists (people like me and I hope you, since you said you qualify to be here) who have probably spent more time in the battle fields of the helping sector that Barnett has spent in the administrative belly of the killing machine.

While he finds hordes of "blind faithed" followers drooling at his in-depth knowledge about all the good things that have come the history of war mongering, us supposed lovers of civil or humanitarian rights accomplishments are busy dancing at the funeral of Rosa Parks, gleeful with enthusiasm that, hey, at least we got ONE seat on the bus of the future.

Sorry folks, but if this is all we can do, we deserve to let the boots on the ground spit-shine their tread marks all over our heads.

If we don't stand up and match him blow for blow with pride in our accomplishments we will get the same treatment that "grassroots" barbarians did to us in our own feminist and free-speech backyards. (Read Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade by Donald Critchlow, where he begins by wondering why, after all the progressive "victories" of the 60s etc. that conservatives get so much attention for their "success.")

People love Barnett because he has found the warm and fuzzy side of being in love with the military. He bows to their passions, expertise and heart-felt fascination with big dangerous toys while maintaining his thinking weapons focused on the celebration of success that follows the tendency to destroy things and build better mousetraps later.

"I'm a practicing strategist," he says in his Blueprint, "but that'll never make me a general—armchair or otherwise. So I stick to vision and focus on ends, leaving the details and means [my comment: which in the military includes falling bombs, shooting people, stuff like that] to those who've spent their adult lives mastering a very difficult business. …. Conversely, I don't spend a lot of time telling officers how a strategy should impact their decisions, or what they should do next in their jobs as a result of hearing it. Those who really get it typically know instantly what needs to be done, and those who don't, well, they won't be around in uniform much longer if I'm right."

So what's wrong with the same thing on our side?

I (or others like me) don't need to tell people in the nonprofit sector their obvious either: caring community strategies for justice, equality and social peace work just fine, thank you. Our field agents (counselors, advocates, educators, mentors, etc.) have often spent their lives doing what policymakers would swear no one can do: they solve people's daily problems and inspire them to be engaged in their own futures.

Hungry people get fed everyday, at least to the extent that community programs have food. Homeless people find shelter, at least sometimes. Hurting people get medicines. Angry people get support. Sad people find comfort that happiness still exists. Depressed people find friends to talk to.

So the aftermath of our combat strategies are better people not blasted out infrastructure waiting for the highest bidder to cash in a public contract.

Unfortunately, we have no momentum of faith to keep our troopers or even our successful convertees to hopefulness feel good about having accomplished something.

Barnett is a case study in knowing how to manipulate our problem against us. Like any good co-dependent to someone oblivious with an alcohol stupor, he knows that humanitarian approaches exist but he keeps us focused elsewhere by pouring us a few rounds of compliments to distract us while his ideas for capturing "everything else" outside of war take over the peace.

I kid you not, folks, that man WANTS a Department of Everything Else!

And he makes an excellent case for the idea. Except when he gets to the part of making the case that it should be soldiers doing the bulk of the peace-making work (they follow orders and understand the military mentality better), though it makes good business sense to outsource contracts to people who get some of their focus outside of a gun scope.

What really gets my anti-camouflage feathers all up in a bunch is that he and others are increasingly shrouding their Gospel in the technological clothing that history has previously reserved for progressive tactics carried out by our young. 

Here is what one of his soldiers of like-mindedness (Newt Gingrich, Winning The Future) says as he propounds on the need for a modern military business mindset to go along with Barnett's peace map: "Government [including the military] is still mired in the pre-computer, pre-communications age. A key component of Entrepreneurial Public Management is to ask every morning what can be done to use computers, the Internet, CDs, DVDs, teleconferencing, and other modern innovations to re-center the government on the citizen."

I think Newt intentionally left out the fax machine and cellular gaming strategies because he knows those have begun to become associated with our past organizing efforts and with the games Asia's young people are playing to make their own socially conscious Smart Mobs, which at this point seem a bit bias more toward The European Dream.

To me the purpose of The Empowerment Ventures is to help put into our entertainment and communication media a mindset in favor of our own pragmatic strategy of optimistic possibilities. I have no illusion about playing the role that Barnett plays but I have little trouble decorating our heroes and heroines with the ribbons and medals they deserve while also exposing him as uncomfortably naked in the front of his parade.

I expect to address some of these issues a bit further in my next column, E-Bay Goes To War, an examination of the trend toward the marketization of military talents. In the meantime, any anger on your front?

Post a comment here or feel free to send me non-threatening messages at Epower.Ventures@hotmail.com.

Allan