"Callin' Out Around the World
Are you ready for a brand new beat?
Summer's here and the time is right...."
This is my third blog about our media project, OPS-USA, and I'm still finding my style and looking for a clever attention-grabber as a way to connect with you. And I think I've hit on something: song lyrics everyone knows. I take a lyric and use it to make my point. Then people get the song in their head and keep thinking about what I said. Pretty clever, eh?
Last week I used a Civil War song, When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Today, I'm going Motown with lyrics from Dancin' in the Street. And, being the former network TV executive that I am, I'm going to play this lyric idea till I've milked every iota of meaning and nuance out of it and I'll jump the shark so blatantly till even the densest of readers are rolling their eyes. Okay, now that I've got that out of my system, let's go.
Today I'm relating the theme of "The Time Is Right" to building the America we all want, one where equal opportunity is available to all Americans regardless of race, religion gender, sexual orientation or economic status.
As we look around us, we've got to realize that government is not always the best answer to get us to our goals. Washington is gridlocked. Washington changes direction. Washington listens to big money. Washington is broken. And while all this can be fixed, right now it doesn't work and the rest of us are negatively impacted by waiting for Washington to get its act together.
But we don't have to wait for the government. We have resources. Great ones. We are connected to each other by incredible social technology. We have "American Know How," years of experience in how to do all sorts of things. We have "American assets," for all our borrowing, we are still the richest country in the world.
And we have one uniquely American asset that virtually everyone respects and loves. We have American veterans: men and women who have demonstrated their love of this country by their actual service. They have walked our talk. They are trained in accomplishing missions, skilled in virtually every useful field of endeavor, motivated by their indisputable love of country, experienced in cooperation, and capable of teaching ordinary American citizens like you and me how to help ourselves. With the help of our veterans, we can do all this while our government is stuck in their old ways, their ideological battles, their inaction, and their tired zero-sum game of picking winners and losers. Let's get our veterans back into action.
First of all, they're veterans. That means they're out of a job. Let's put them to work for us, the people. Imagine if you will, a team of seven or eight veterans and maybe a service dog, who can be the media focal point to assemble the American public, marshal America's great resources and bring their own skills to bear on any problem, anywhere, anytime, RIGHT NOW!
That's the goal of our project, OPS-USA, to create a multi-media phenomenon that features a real "A Team" of charismatic, smart, motivated veterans to unleash on America's most persistent problems: Energy. Education. Infrastructure. Food Production. Health care. Job production. We believe that this "greatest military the world has ever known" is great for more than making war and wreaking destruction on our enemies. We believe they can help lead us on a path back to our own greatness. We are America after all. Let's walk our talk.
Sound good? We need your help to make it work. We need your contribution, whatever that may be. Maybe you know someone who should be part of that team. Tell us about them. Maybe you live in a community or work in a school or a health care clinic or somewhere else that needs the kind of help this team can offer. Tell us about it. Maybe you have time to help. Bring it. Maybe you believe as we do that America is as good as we make it. If we want our country back, we have to ask what we can do to help it come back. Join our effort. Learn about us. Visit us at www.ops-usa.com or on Facebook or Twitter @opsusa_vet. Help us help each other.
The poet Victor Hugo famously said, "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." But how do you know that the time has indeed come? That the time is right? Buddhists believe in the concept of "nowness" -- that "now" is always the time to act regardless of the outcome. It will be either a success or a failure. Stop worrying about it and seize the opportunity or it will be neither. And that missed opportunity would be the real shame.
Callin' out around the world
Are you ready for a brand new beat?
Summer's here
The Time Is Right