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Summit Issues

It's admirable to want to "do all we can to promote character and virtue in Rome‰ and help "make the City of Rome a Character City," as the January press release said. But wait. Whatever interest there is to have a character parade, the parade route is not well settled. The planned route offers: Speech, Group, Prioritize, Group, and˜voilá˜all will become clear. Think about it:

• Speech: Educated experience dotted with examples.
• Group: Heterogeneous groups will take an hour to identify character issues in the community, where they exist, and possible solutions. What exactly are "character issues"? How does one identify them? What is it that facilitators are supposed to facilitate?
• Prioritize: Then whatever issues are fingered will be prioritized. Which means that even if people don‚t know what "character issues" are, the most popular of them will float to the top as "significant."
• Group: After that, homogeneous groups will sum up issues and identify possible solutions related to that group's special interest -- law & safety, education, health, media, government, business, youth, parents, military, and faith-based. They, presumably, will urge others to direct, teach, heal, present, legislate, manage, express, parent, order, or preach something to make a difference.
• And voilá! That leads up to the vote for Rome to become a "City of Character" without effective plans to actually develop character. This seems a fine a way to appear to do something yet go nowhere. It‚s like deciding that "Character is good" and packing it in for the day. We‚ll all go home with a gold star on our attendance certificate and a good feeling in our belly.

Character is an art because it is manufactured from experience. It turns out to be surprisingly uniform because all of us are human. It comes to individuals from their own experience, when nurtured one-on-one and one-by-one. Character isn‚t something people just decide to have. Character is a process that takes hold when people are stimulated to reflect on lessons buried in their own experiences, then look at them with new insight to extract new and useful ways to deal with the world.

The best that can be done is help people understand they are not alone, that everyone wrestles with the simple daily problems of living. We can help them put their lives in context and point them to great thinkers who have dealt with similar issues. We can recommend tools that help people think more clearly and see why it is in their interest. That's likely to be much more useful than to speechify, facilitate, and prioritize.

Most of all, we can be careful. Character By Committee tries to appear effective by vigorously trimming branches of the tree when hacking at the root is the practical way to make a difference. That's because community issues are symptoms while character is a process to deal with life at its very core.

Stephen B. Waters
September, 2005

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