Regaining Our Footing



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How to Regain our Strategic Footing. Lieutenant Colonel, US Air Force. Prepared in association with. National Defense Fellows Program. International Security Studies Program. Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) USAF Academy, Colorado Springs. GEICO TV Spot, 'Regain Your Footing' Submissions should come only from the actors themselves, their parent/legal guardian or casting agency. Please include at least one social/website link containing a recent photo of the actor. Submissions without photos may not be accepted.

I have been thinking a lot about resilience, the quality that enables us to regain our footing, move past the most difficult circumstances and move forward. Ap psychologymr volkmars course pages. Resilience is not as simple as shaking off what has been and letting it go. Being resilient is built on accepting what has been, recognizing the impact it has had on us and building from there to create something new, something that is even stronger.

There was a time in my life when I spent a lot of time thinking about, and writing about, resilience. As children of older parents, my brother and I lost both of our parents before the time we reached our mid-30s. It was painful and difficult to feel “orphaned” but we had one another. Eighteen months apart, we were each other’s support, sounding boards, confidants, oldest friends. If you had asked me, I would have told you that I could not have imagined my life without my brother.

Yet just a few years after losing our second parent, my brother was killed in a tragic accident at home. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it for the longest time, thinking over and over again that I had just talked with him on the phone, that we had made plans and that, suddenly, his life was over. Devastated does not even begin to describe it.

Regaining Our Footing

For the better part of a year, or maybe even longer, I struggled. I saw my brother in every tall man holding a little girl’s hand across a parking lot. I saw him in someone’s profile, heard his voice in someone’s laugh, looking desperately for the person who was no longer there.

I tried very hard to “be myself” for that year, both with my family and in my professional life. But I know that my performance didn’t fool very many. There was no escaping the empty space, the bottomless grief, the constant ache of unshed tears in my throat. I haunted the bookstore, and Amazon, for books that would help me, guidance that would tell me not just what to do but would tell me that I would survive as others have survived.

Regain Our Footing

Eventually my reading turned to the topic of resilience, focusing on the behaviors, the tools, that enable that all-too-difficult “bouncing back.” I realized then, and even more so now, that we have choices to make, not the least of which is whether, when faced with the worst kind of adversity, to be “better or bitter.” We can choose to embrace the pain, the unfairness, the tragedy and stay in that place—angry, bitter, locked in or we can choose to move forward and find ways to identify and use those terrible life lessons to move forward.

I am not the same person I was before my brother died. I know that clearly. But I also know that surviving his loss taught me many things about myself, about my relationships, about what matters. If I could rewind the clock, I would do so in less than a heartbeat. But I can’t. So I carry his presence with me always and I try to let the people I love know how much they mean to me, how much I love them.

As I think about rebuilding past this year of COVID, as I think about pushing beyond the fatigue into the future, I think about those lessons I learned so many years ago. We will never be the people we were prior to COVID. We have all lived through too much, we have struggled, we have been afraid. We have watched elders that we love lose their battle with this virus. We have looked for answers and help that just were not there. We had moments of despair and endless sleepless nights. And we survived.

Regain our footing

With vaccine becoming a reality, I believe that we will be successful in vanquishing this virus. I believe that we will be able to restore our strength, our connections and our lives. We can and will all come back from this COVID year. Not unchanged but stronger. Always stronger.

The following is a blog post by Daniel Stid in The Art of Association.

Autumn is here, and we are hard-pressed to feel encouraged about the future of democracy in America. If you are like me, even a quick survey of the day's news can induce various combinations of disbelief, anger, disdain, fear, and disillusionment. Some of us may be feeling all of the above. We need some hope and a sense of how we might regain our footing as citizens to renew the world’s oldest democracy.

We can find them in a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Science's Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship entitled, 'Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.' Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Eric Liu of Citizen University co-chaired the 35-member Commission. Its composition represented a suitable portion of the nation's political and demographic diversity. The 47 listening sessions the Commission hosted across the country further expanded and enriched the viewpoints informing its deliberations. The Commission's report won't help us resolve our immediate challenges. But whatever happens in the near-term, the report makes clear we will still have a long way to go to revitalize our democracy–and it shows us how we could get from here to there.

Two aspects of the report resonate with our core themes here at The Art of Association. The first is the emphasis the Commission places on the interplay between our political institutions and processes, on the one hand, and our civic culture, on the other. As the report observes, 'a healthy constitutional democracy depends on a virtuous cycle in which responsive political institutions foster a healthy civic culture of participation and responsibility, while a healthy civic culture – a combination of values, norms, and narratives – keeps our political institutions responsive and inclusive.'

At present, of course, we find ourselves experiencing not a virtuous cycle but a vicious one. Dysfunctional institutions, efforts to disenfranchise fellow Americans, and demagoguery in Washington sow distrust, cynicism, and contempt for fellow citizens in our civic culture. These reverberating signals are, in turn, picked up and amplified further by our elected officials.

How do we reverse this doom loop? Nineteen of the report's 31 recommendations deal with reforms in our political institutions and processes. I will touch on just a few here that would be salutary responses to some of our current challenges. They include several steps for making voting more accessible, e.g., automatic voter registration and turning election day into a national holiday. These steps are combined with a call to make voting mandatory, as it is in Australia and Belgium, and as jury duty is for all eligible citizens now. Download free test complete tool cost estimator. The report also calls for eighteen-year terms for Supreme Court justices. Presidents would get to fill one seat in each congress. Such a change would routinize Supreme Court nominations and reduce the temperature of our intensely polarizing and norm-busting fights over them.

In a departure for reports of this kind, Our Common Purpose goes beyond fixes for our political institutions and processes to propose several interventions to bolster our civic culture. One is establishing the norm and expectation that young people will dedicate a year of their lives to serve the nation in the military, government service programs, or nonprofit organizations. Others include a deep investment in civic education for all age groups and the development of new narratives to revitalize our commitment to constitutional democracy and citizenship. The report also recognizes the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence presents a unique opportunity to mobilize and engage the nation toward these ends.

Regaining

The Commission transcends the simplistic and divisive debate Donald Trump and the New York Times want us to have about whether the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or the initial importation of slaves in 1619 is the right starting point of our nation's exceptional history. The report observes that,

Regain Your Footing

polarized depictions of American history—the triumphal and the genocidal – continue to divide us and impede productive civic collaboration. One of the great challenges facing the country is how to meld the good and the bad of U.S. history into shared narratives that a diverse population can broadly endorse. These narratives must do justice both to core democratic values and to our often egregious failures to live up to them. Enslavement and Native American genocide are part of American history. So, too, is the invention of modern rights-based constitutionalism. We must acknowledge all of these stories.

The second aspect of Our Common Purpose I want to highlight is its recognition that 'institutions and culture intersect in the realm of civil society: the ecosystem of associations and groups in which people practice habits of participation and self-rule and reinforce norms of mutual obligation.' We cannot bring about the changes needed in our politics and civic culture without tending to the health of our civic infrastructure and leadership in our associational life. And this work needs to happen in local communities where the lion's share of social capital formation and bridge-building occurs.

The report calls for two innovative interventions to strengthen our civic ecosystem. The first is the development of a 'National Trust for Civic Infrastructure.' It would support investment in spaces like parks, libraries, schools, faith-based institutions, museums, and community centers as well as programs and events 'that have the capacity to connect disparate segments of our society.' More human connections and shared experiences in our local communities can help countermand the adverse effects of nationalized and polarized politics. The Trust could start readily enough with philanthropic and private sector contributions. But the commissioners ultimately envision a publicly funded endowment along the lines of the National Endowment for Democracy. This year Congress appropriated $300,000,000 to underwrite the promotion of democracy in 90 countries abroad. Our Common Purpose rightly asks, 'Why not fund democracy at home?'

The second intervention is to invest in and build upon the leadership of the group Peter Levine of Tufts University has termed 'the civic one million' – the approximate number of Americans already leading civic groups, associations, and networks seeking to rebuild our democracy from the bottom-up. These leaders and their organizations will be the catalysts for civic renewal, provided they have the resources they need. Philanthropic foundations can and should step up to underwrite their leadership. The report does not touch on this it, but doing so would entail a substantial shift in how foundations make grants in this area. Instead of smaller, highly-specified, short-term project grants furthering their own strategies, funders need to provide larger, unrestricted, multi-year grants that keep civic leaders and their organizations in the driver's seat.

The period between now and the presidential inauguration on January 20 will test our democracy in a way it has not been for several generations. While Our Common Purpose will not help us resolve the looming crisis, it conveys an ethos of citizenship and vision of a shared patriotism we can draw upon to ground and gird ourselves in the weeks ahead. And once the clamor and uncertainty subside, assuming they will at some point, the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship has equipped us with an incisive playbook for the future.

Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship

The Commission spent two years engaging with communities all over the U.S. to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life. Its final and bipartisan report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, was released in June 2020 and includes six strategies and 31 ambitious recommendations to help the nation emerge as a more resilient democracy by 2026, the nation's 250th anniversary.

Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu