Reaching for The Note amid the little minds of politics

He contemplated, as he would relate to me later, if he wanted to live in the city where the collective delusion was "we run the country," or the city where the collective delusion was "we own the country." He chose the latter and went to New York. He now owns a commercial bank and found a documentary movie production company to engage the more creative part of his mind.

I have been thinking about our city, our country, and our collective aspiration and/or, for better or for worse, delusion. I have come up blank.

I started looking around to see what others may have as their collective goal, as a nation.

Across the Pacific, the United States has this so-called "Manifest Destiny" as its national aspiration. Rightly or wrongly, American people believe strongly in the virtue of their principles and form of democracy and their institutions. They have been on a mission to spread these institutions and remake the world in their image. They believe this is their destiny under God to accomplish the work. That's why after the 9/11 attacks, one newspaper headline read "Why do they so hate us?" It was, I thought, one of the most telling evidence of the American psyche.

John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 Inaugural Address urged the American people not to ask what the country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. He urged his fellow Americans to ask "what together we can do for the freedom of man."

Kennedy's Peace Corp and its works with the poorest of the poor in developing countries around the world, has been one of his remarkable and lasting legacies.

At the watershed of the US civil right movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in August 1963 delivered the powerful  "I Have a Dream" remarks at the Lincoln Monument in Washington.

"I have a dream," he declared, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." It was his dream, he said, that one day sons of slaves and those of slave owners might sit down together "at the table of brotherhood."

Today, forty-five years since, Barrack Obama, son of a black man and white woman, stands poised as the nominee of the Democratic Party in the contest for the highest office in the Land of the Free; barring, that is, another Adlai Stevenson's reversal of fortune at the convention in August.

Not far from our border, is Singapore. It is an island country with land size smaller than our Phuket. It was forced to become independent from Malaysia in 1965 with no natural resources other than its people and their unflinching desire for survival. Singapore's founding father Harry Lee Kuan Yew described the separation as his "moment of anguish." He went on, however, to lay out the grand design for the country—that "Singapore shall be forever a sovereign democratic and independent country….and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of the people in a most and just equal society."

Today, Singapore's GDP is one of the highest in the world. Its people are the hardest working no-nonsense people.

Many tend to trivialize Singapore's success as a nation. They would say, it is only a city-state and with Lee's strong arms, it would not be difficult to mobilize and achieve success.

Those critics are dead wrong. Singapore's success did not come naturally, and it did not happen accidentally. It is the result of great planning and execution. By setting its sight high on its mission and never losing sight of its goal, the country defies one of the basic laws of nature and politics: gravity. The country has its own ups and downs, but it has not fallen off the cliff or into the gutter.

It is the national aspiration that set one country apart from others. Such vision provides the road map for the path a country and its people to take. It provides the common purpose needed for a country to reach for a higher plane, and escape the doldrums of the vicious circles and stalemates brought about by petty politics.

As it was said by Edmund Burke—"great empires and little minds go ill together."

Does our present day politics bear evidence of a nation we have become—one of little minds?

Many of our policy-makers are making noise, not policies. We seem to have no road map of where we want to go as a nation, what we aspire to be as a people. We seem to have adopted an ad-hoc attitude and dangerous laissez-faire outlook. Mired in our own shortcomings and short-sightedness of our many governments, we defer our future wholly and conveniently to the "divine intervention."

Several years ago I was watching a Masterpieces series on television on the American composer—the late Leonard Bernstein. The program called "Reaching for the Note" opened with Bernstein's own remarks:

"In the beginning was the Note, and

the note was with God; and

whosoever can reach for that Note,

reach high, and bring it back to

us on earth…and to the extent

of his reach, partakes of the divine."

Bernstein's "the Note" is THAT perfect tune all musicians aspire to touch.

The Note is what all of us should aspire to reach beyond, and despite of, all our limitations, to become better than what we are born to be.

Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times journalist wrote in his best selling book "The World Is Flat" that the ever-increasing connectivity in the world and the explosion of wealth in India and China are challenging "the rest of us to run even faster to stay in place."

Thailand in recent years has decidedly been doing just the opposite. We seem to have been running firmly and mindlessly in place. By so doing, we are running even faster backward in the world that is becoming increasingly flat, risking falling off the fast train and disappearing into oblivion.

It was not always like this.

It does not have to be like this.