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 2008: A Year of Awakening
by Tom Campbell
December 23, 2008
Let’s face it. 2008 hasn’t been a very good year in North Carolina, or anyplace in our nation, for that matter. What a difference a year makes. In a matter of months North Carolina flip-flopped from Mardi-Gras, where our biggest problems seemed to be how to handle explosive growth and expansion, to Halloween, where nothing and no one performed as expected.
We could recite the traditional litany of stories that shaped the year but that would distract from the overarching theme. 2008 was the year when leaders didn’t lead, our regulators didn’t regulate and too many of our business executives demonstrated how little regard they have for shareholders, employees, and customers. This year forced many of us into changing our travel habits, our spending habits and, for many, our work habits.
2008 was a year of awakening to a new, sobering reality accompanied by alarming frustration. How do you deal with government leaders who refuse to acknowledge problems, accept responsibility or admit failure? What are you to do when elected representatives spend more and more money but won’t address major problems? Where is the fairness of executives who earn 400 times as much as the average employee in their companies yet lay off workers citing budgetary reasons? How do you impress upon people the importance of being involved in the electoral process when special interest groups practically “buy” the outcome? What choices are left to citizens struggling to make house payments, put children through schools, and pay their bills while those who acted unethically and with little regard for others get a bailout? Finally, what word can you give that 2009 or 2010 will be different?
We come to this year’s end disillusioned, depressed and brokenhearted. It’s not that we were Pollyannas refusing to acknowledge problems, but most of us had this basic belief that even while there were rotten apples people would do the right thing. No less than Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, admitted he was greatly surprised this wasn’t the case.
Maybe 2008 was a wake-up call to us. What role did we, individually and as a people, play in what happened? Weren’t we so busy accumulating, working, living within our own world that we weren’t looking beyond? We would never suggest it is our fault that people violated laws and broke trust with us but let us admit that many did so because they knew few were watching and they knew they could act without penalty.
So let us begin this New Year with new resolve, first to put our own house in order. What is truly important in our lives? How do we live these priorities? Next, let us pledge to hold those we elect, those who would lead us and those institutions we support to new levels of accountability, praising those who deserve it, exposing those who don’t. We may say we don’t have much power to stop the abuses, but we have more than we know. When people learn others are watching and speaking out, when there are consequences if they act badly or fail to act, most will clean up their act. Once awakened we can and we must learn from and make changes to prevent another year like 2008.
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