Editor’s note: This article is part of a series. Click here for the previous article.
Gordon Graham here and hello again. In this article I will move on to Family 10 of the 10 Families of Risk—Political Risks. If you recall my comments on Family One—External Risks many articles ago, I identified those risks as the most difficult family of risks we face. Oddly enough, Family 10 is the second-most difficult family of risks we face. Like external risks, we have very little control over politicians, yet they have great control over our society.
Allow me to digress before getting into my thoughts on politicians. Think back to 2020 when we were living with COVID restrictions on travel and meetings and entertainment. You’re spending more time at home, and perhaps more time watching television. You have finished Netflix and Prime and do not want to pay more money for monthly subscriptions. You’re unable to find a rerun of CHiPs (perhaps the greatest TV show ever) on ME TV and you need a laugh. What can you do?
Go to any search engine and type in “famous quotes about politicians.” You will be very busy for quite a while reading some very, very funny and simultaneously sad quotes from various people about politicians. By the way, in preparation for this article I spent considerable time reading these various ramblings and while I have several favorites, this one tops my list:
“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.”
These words are attributed to James Freeman Clarke, a theologian and author from the mid-1800s. I chose this as my favorite quote (although there are many other quotes that are hilarious) because Mr. Clarke’s quote is the most accurate of the lot.
Like external risks, we have very little control over politicians, yet they have great control over our society.
Earlier in this series I wrote about Family Three—Strategic Risks, which focuses on the importance of looking into the future and proactively addressing issues. In that article I bemoaned how shortsighted too many people are—how for many of them the future is Friday and the distant future is next Friday. I also wrote about my mother. She had no formal education beyond high school, but she was brilliant in so many ways, including preparing for the future. She saw things decades in advance and took action to address them proactively. Every time I see someone my age typing on a keyboard using two fingers instead of 10 fingers, I remember how my mom enrolled me in typing school in my early teens.
How it is that she was able to do this—and so many of our highly educated politicians (many of them lawyers from top-notch institutions) are unable to do so? In some of my recent writings in this series I mentioned how many politicians jumped on the “defund police” bandwagon or the incredibly irresponsible “abolish the police” train during 2020 and 2021. Were they really thinking about the next generation—or were they thinking about the next election? Are they completely unaware of how violent people in our society can be, how many murders we suffer every week in major cities, how many violent crime victims we have?
Many communities experienced a dramatic increase in violent crime—murders up, carjackings up, robberies up, sexual assaults up—in the months after the “defund the police” movement. Now, crime is a complex societal issue, and it’s not the point of this article to demonstrate a cause-and-effect between the defund movement and an increase in crime. But what I do want to point out is how very quickly many of the politicos saw this rise in crime might impact their next election and changed their tune.
“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.”
So what can we do to influence our collective future in a positive way? That will be our focus in my next article. I will give you a hint: Please remember that you are not just a cop, or a firefighter, or a paramedic or an officer in a correctional facility. You are a citizen and you vote for people who will be running things. More on this next month. Until then, please work safely and remember how critical your role is in our society.
Timely Takeaway—Have you ever visited PFI – Police Futurists International? I am a huge fan of this site as there are some very, very smart people all with a background in law enforcement talking about the future of our profession.
