Chaos, Control, Contract, & Connecting the Dots
While reading Suzanne Collins’ latest addition to the Hunger Games saga, I couldn’t help drawing parallels to our own current state of affair, what it means to be a leader, and the choices we all are going to make in the coming month. How chaos, control, and contract, all weave their way in and out of our daily life, and what that means for leadership, and power. The quotes included in this three-part post are all taken from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Part Three: Contract
“One look tells you ours have had more food, nicer clothing, and better dental care,” said Dean Highbottom. “Assuming anything more, a physical, mental, or especially a moral superiority, would be a mistake. That sort of hubris almost finished us off in the war.”
Take a moment to think about a few of the contracts that make up your life. When you wake up in the morning, do you look at your email or social media? If you take public transportation, do you use a Ventra card? If you drive, do you have car insurance? What about your home? Do you rent or own?
Consider a traffic light. You are nearing the intersection, and the light changes from green to yellow. You are in control of what decision comes next. Do you press the gas or the brake? Do you accelerate through the intersection with the possibility that you may collide with someone who is waiting to turn left in front of you? Do you brake being comfortable with the fact that you made the safest decision? Either choice, we have perceived a perceived control over that situation. We, as a society, have embraced the control and contract that comes with knowing what may happen if we speed through that light.
Now think of a time where you have been at a busy intersection and the traffic light is not working. Drivers inch their way through the intersection confused about who is supposed to have the right of way and who gets to turn. There’s an overall lack of order, and one accident could cause chaos.
There are contracts that weave their way through our lives every day. They provide structure, dictate our rights, maintain order, and provide us with a moral compass of what is right or wrong.
“What are lies but attempts to conceal some sort of weakness?”
Now picture yourself as an immigrant from Haiti who came to America for asylum because your home was ravaged by a natural disaster. You had to make the hard decision to uproot your life, take your children, and flee. While in America, you have been living according to the contract that allowed you access to this nation. You have been contributing to the economy, you have learned English, you have been able to sink some roots, establish a community, and your family has adapted.
Now, with a simple signature, a new contract has been introduced. Your once legal immigration status has been revoked, and you are told that by March 5th, 2021 if you do not leave the country, you will be put at risk for deportation.
This is exactly what is happening to over 400,000 immigrants.
To quote another famous movie, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. It has become painfully obvious that our current administration is abusing their right to the contracts that govern this country. This is one example of many that have changed the contract on immigration for the worse, all rolled out under a cloud of “protecting American jobs”.
Through destabilizing the truth, claiming things as “fake news”, polarizing the extremes, we as a people are left to interpret what is true. We are left to interpret the contract that founded this nation.
“You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. Winning a war doesn’t give you that right. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”
My grade school didn’t have classrooms, it had pods. Each pod was comprised of 5 classroom spaces that opened to a common area covered in a bland brown carpet, and a hall that led to the library, gym, and two other similarly constructed pods. The classroom spaces didn’t have doors and only had ¾ walls separating each space so noise traveled fairly freely from classroom to classroom. I don’t really know if the school was built to foster some sort of pilot program, or if it was an architect from the 70s that drafted the plans in hopes to be a revolutionary. The layout did promote collaboration and I remember at the beginning of each day all five classes would stand, put their hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance together. I remember sometimes competing with my neighbor in second and third grade, slowly getting louder and louder as we spoke until we were both screaming “liberty and justice for all”.
This is one of the earliest examples of a contract that I can remember. The simple act of saying this compound sentence spoke to my rights as an American, my commitment to my nation, and the unification of our beliefs. It spoke to the freedom I had as a citizen, the rights that I had, and what could never be taken away from me. While it goes without saying, the albeit simple phrase, “under God” continues to cause controversy to this day with the last ruling being made in May of 2014, but having the ability to “pledge my allegiance” was something I was born with, not something I earned.
What are two cabinet-level positions?
What territory did the united states buy from France in 1803?
Who is the Chief Justice of the United States now?
I’ll be honest, until recently I didn’t know John Roberts was the Chief Justice of the United States, and I could not tell you what territory we purchased from France (Louisiana) or two cabinet-level positions (Vice President and Attorney General) without googling it. My senior year of high school I took a split semester course. One semester was dedicated to “government” and the other was about “economy”. I am sure the semester about government covered the topics of these questions, but I’ll admit, I was far more interested in socializing (which was made much easier by my new Nokia cell phone that had texting capabilities) than learning about territory acquisition or checks and balances. We didn’t talk “politics” at home, and it wasn’t until Obama ran for office that I cared to engage with anything to do with how our nation was governed.
My citizenship was not earned, it was given to me at birth. I was like the many Americans, who abuse the privilege of their citizenship by not engaging, learning, or voting. All three of these questions are common questions found on the naturalization test to become a United States citizen. I can guarantee you that many of our naturalized citizens know far more than most about how this country was founded, how the government works, and how our nation came to be. Would it not be fair to argue then that immigrants may be more American than the majority of those who were born here?
But yet, there are fights for the “right to bear arms”, and fights for “freedom of speech” because those two lines of the contract that dictates our freedom allow us to control what we can say, and control what we can do. We are put into a position where we only care about the contract when it may affect our perception of our control.
As a leader of a team, as a United States Citizen, and as a human being, I have made the promise to no longer let ignorance be the contract that dictates how I act, how I respond, and how I engage. I understand that while bias is inevitable, the pursuit of knowledge is one of the most important commitments we can make to ourselves. That a commitment to learning can heighten your self-awareness to a place that bias is acknowledged and looked beyond.
For any leader of any organization, as a partner, a child, or a parent, I would encourage you to do the same. Make the commitment to learning and see where it takes you.
Chaos may be a natural part of the process to understanding where we may find the boundaries of our control, and where we may understand the contracts that define that control. Without that chaos, we may never know growth. We as a people have to choose what we do with the contracts and control that come from that. Will we be a nation that continues to benefit the few, or will we grow to be a nation that cares about the many?
