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Patience

January 20, 2015

I found it amazing that an important "test" match in cricket last month between India and Australia was scheduled for three days but could last five days, or might end after two. This flexible scheduling is just part of the game.

On one day of that match, Australia was able to bat all morning, declare a lunch break, and then keep batting most of the afternoon before India ever had an opportunity to go on offense. When they finally did, India was already behind 400 and something to zero.

It was equally intriguing to watch the fastest two of the 117 yachts entered in the 70th Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race finish the more than 628-nautical mile course within 48 minutes of each other, but 11 hours before the third place yacht. And, two days before the last of the 103 finishers. 

I decided that Australian sports fans must have a different definition of drama, a lot more patience for events of long duration, and much more tolerance for events of indefinite length than we do in the USA. Perhaps it is in the DNA of Australians to be patient ... for they are certainly among the most polite populations I've encountered.

Perhaps all of this is inherent in the character of a country that is almost as large as the USA’s first 48 states but has only seven percent of the USA’s population. In fact, China's population increases each year by more people than the total population of Australia ... which may have something to do with 36 people being killed during a human stampede in Shanghai this past New Year’s Eve.

Common Good

November 23, 2011

During the first week of July in 1995, I read an editorial by Judith A. Ramaley, president of Portland State University in Oregon, that seems as appropriate for today’s events and public policy environment as it was then. Perhaps even more so.  Ms. Ramaley wrote:

“I used to think that character is how you behave when no one is looking.  For most of us that may still be true.  For public figures, however, character is how you behave when everybody is looking . . .

“. . . Nearly a century ago when President Woodrow Wilson was still a college professor, he said:  ‘A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street corners or the opinions of the newspaper.  A nation is led by a man who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into common meaning; speaks not the rumors of the street but a new principle for a new age; a man for whom the voices of the nation . . . unite in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.’”

As our “modern” nation heads into the heart of yet another election season, with earlier and earlier primaries leaving little separation from the last acrimonious campaigns, it is this quality above all others that I’m seeking to find in the candidates for public office:  the uncommon heart and mind to unite us for the common good.