COMMENTARY: Will `negative energy’ prevail?

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is the author of”On a Journey,”daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, send e-mail to: journey(AT)interpath.com) UNDATED _ A company is seeing its fortunes go sour. Some employees respond by waxing creative, searching for […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is the author of”On a Journey,”daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, send e-mail to: journey(AT)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ A company is seeing its fortunes go sour.


Some employees respond by waxing creative, searching for new products, new manufacturing processes, new behaviors in a mature industry. Others blame and find fault.

Negative energy seems to prevail at this company. A culture of blame-avoidance stifles new ideas and discourages an honest grappling with issues or investment in solutions.

A startup congregation struggles to find its identity. Founders watch reality intrude on their dreams. In the confusion, some step forward and encourage fresh vision. Others complain.

Here, too, negative energy seems to prevail. Faces that were hopeful not long ago seem wounded and tentative now.

In Washington, leaders face thorny issues: nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, a growing national consensus against tobacco, unease about Social Security, would-be immigrants clamoring at the border, a seemingly unstoppable flood of cocaine and heroin.

Fresh ideas bubble up at the fringes, but in the center blaming and fault-finding are the only game in town. Blame the Central Intelligence Agency for not forecasting the Indian and Pakistani tests. Blame greedy Democrats for wanting to pillage Big Tobacco, or blame solicitous Republicans for sleeping with yet another predator. Blame Hillary for overly grand ideas about health care reform. Blame Colombia for our inability to control our own borders. Blame cheap Mexican labor for lethargy in American industry.

Short-term advantage becomes the goal: How can I turn this problem into your fault and my gain? Accountability is the enemy: Don’t get caught without a chair when the music stops. Solutions _ which always require fresh thinking and new behavior _ seem unwelcome and exotic. Instead, the attitude seems to be: Let’s try this self-destructive behavior one more time, and maybe the outcome will be different.

I shudder to think what will happen when the stock market turns south, when unemployment returns to more normal levels, and when our economic partnership with Latin America leads nowhere, Europe’s emerging unity creates an economic juggernaut and Japan regains its footing.


Americans haven’t responded well to bust cycles in the past. We have chased imperial adventures, scapegoated minorities and allowed the xenophobic fringe to claim center stage. What will happen this time?

Our personal resources seem diminished. We seem fragile and isolated, clinging to jobs, spending while we have it, uninterested in our neighbors. Our spiritual communities seem prickly and triumphalist, engaged more in arguing than in serving, more eager to provide numbers-building shows than to transform people’s lives.

In our politics, we already lurch from one would-be answer-guy to another. Will we lurch even more wildly when the bust comes? Scapegoating of blacks is well under way as school systems rediscover segregation. Resentment against Hispanics is growing. And that’s happening during prosperity. What crosses will burn during a downturn?

The boom seems fragile, more a convergence of good luck than underlying value. Corporate leaders seem fixated on quarter-to-quarter results and keeping stock prices high. It becomes prudent to lay off workers rather than retrain and motivate them; to seek mergers rather than new products; to shun capital investment; to break patents rather than do original research; to sue the successful rather than innovate. As we saw in 1929, soaring stock prices don’t equal economic vitality. Just ask former employees of Xerox, Kodak, AT&T, Nabisco, and the host of recently acquired banks.

My concern isn’t economic downturns. They happen. Economists say they need to happen. My concern is that troubles will turn us ugly, mean and even more self-focused than we already are. Blaming is infectious. So is scapegoating. So is self-protection.

Nobility of spirit, on the other hand, is difficult. True leadership leads to sacrifice. True faith leads to personal transformation. True community requires self-denial. True creativity takes the long view.


In nervous and contentious times, however, the charlatan is welcomed and the visionary spurned. Easy answers vanquish wisdom. Hounding strangers is easier than seeking discernment of a changing world. We should watch the auto strike that began in Flint, Mich., and is spreading now to other General Motors Corp. plants. Observers say attitudes are the angriest they have ever seen among workers.

When our only ground is economic prosperity, we are in danger.

DEA END EHRICH

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!