The art of strategy

I was part of a facilitating team last Friday and Saturday that enabled a group of ‘stakeholders’ to assess the current health of Saipan’s Health System, particularly as it applies to issues around diabetes. Using essential standards developed by the Centers for Disease Control to gauge health systems around the country, the assessment culminated in proposals to insure effective responses to the identified needs that emerged from the process.

The assessment seemed to reveal fragmented efforts in dealing with diabetes, or, for that matter the full gamut of health issues and services, even within the public sector itself. This emerged at every step of the full process of identifying needs, developing responses, linking need to resources, and refining the institutionalized delivery services.

Thus it did not come as a surprise when CNMI Legislator Joe Guerrero proposed that a comprehensive health plan be created to target diabetes. Josephine Sablan of Guma Ayuda added that such be a strategic plan as well. “Tito” Mohammed Mashiur Raqhmankhan of the Bangladesh community association added that the plan, the policies, the programs, the databases, etc. be housed in a specific Center for diabetes.

Engaging in such activity as plotting out one’s response to an obvious need such as the widespread incidence of diabetes particularly to Pacific Islanders and the native populations of the Americas is where the activity of mulling over the issue of a viable social ethics takes place. It does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it the sole province of sectarian religious moralists and academic ivory tower nesters. It is in the knowing, doing and being of warm bodies who come together around a singular issue such as diabetes that the issue of a viable social ethics and of effective social transformation takes place.

For this to take place, I expressed in the last two columns two premises so far. Premise one is the singularity of the whole earth as the main context. Human systems are important, and the gains of the last 300 years toward “equality and justice for all” hold promise toward the possibility of “peace on earth, goodwill to all.” But the conflicts that has arisen out of competition toward access of the earth’s natural resources, the disparity in the distribution of benefits to the earth’s populations and within national boundaries, and a self-indulgent non-sustainable consumer lifestyle, have produced a global social organization where a few enjoy the benefits of social advances while the labor of a huge majority undergirds contemporary life’s beneficence. Further, the indiscriminate abuse of the planetary resources threatens the very existence of the specie itself, or at least, provides a continuing sufferance of many and suggests a bleak future for the coming generations.

Premise two invokes what has been the gift of Western rationality and the consequent scientific predictive/anticipatory disciplines to identify and confront the reality of social contradictions, expressed in many planning processes by such terms as barriers, blocks, hindrances, problems, impediments, constraints, etc. Planning that is not rooted in facing reality, for skewing what is, and opting for finger pointing on who is to blame for the current situation, or worse, resigning to the convenient assessment statement widely heard in planning circles that try to explain the prevalence of a situation by identifying the “absence of, or lack of something,” simply deteriorates into creating lists of wish dreams, often nicely packaged with multicolor illustrations, but left languishing at best as a PR piece to visitors in a planning office. As Legislator Heinz Hofschneider emphatically declared during the early part of the assessment process, a lot of the issues of effectiveness will not be dealt with successfully without a fundamental ‘paradigm shift’ within society and its social institutions.

Premise three requires a winning strategy to implement a comprehensive yet compellingly designed plan that targets such paradigm shifting, behavioral modifications, structural deconstructions and new systems creation. Next week, we will deal with premise four which obligates personal, communal and corporate ‘stakeholders’ to put their pocketbooks where their articulations are.

The process of creating a winning strategy is as crucial as the objective plan it creates. Genuine democracy is rooted in local decision-making. It is important to insist that any decision that can be made at a smaller scope of governance should be made at that level. One of the reasons why local decision-making does not succeed in involving more people and generating real power is that local leadership and most people are not skilled in effective group methods. The processes of consensus building are not clearly understood.

Democratic politics in its current sense of voting in representatives to governmental bodies will remain a strategy of action. Awake people often get frustrated with the electoral process. Electoral politics are often just a choice for the least bad of two non-solutions. But electoral politics needs to play a primary role in our strategic thinking. Democratic institutions, however flawed, are our only viable means of bringing discipline to the anarchy currently practiced by institutions whose sole purpose is to make profit even over the suffering of many. Note the case of AIDS/HIV medicine in Africa.

Widely respected PBS journalist and former Pres. Johnson’s Press Secretary Bill Moyers told the graduating class of New York University early June: “The middle class and working poor are told that what’s happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand.’ This is a lie. What’s happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.” Moyers is hardly classified as a radical.

Self-regulatory measures had not proven effective in the past. Rather than demonizing governmental regulation, we need to design truly ingenious regulations that create a fair playing field for broad-based political participation, equitable economic activity and dynamic cultural renaissance.

Yet, democratic politics in its functional sense involves a huge constituency and it must be a primary strategy of action. The processes of broad-based consensus building are not clearly understood. Many organizations have too little continuing democratic structure to be effective. Often, what they have are remnants of a patriarchal top-down military command structure where responsibility resides in one office that presides over a multitude.

The American experiment professes to encourage the openness of every-person participation. But even with the New England town meeting format, there are simply too little cultural traditions that have carried democratic practices. Simply stated, it is not easy to work with people at the grassroots level. Thus, too many activists opt to overemphasize top-down methods of tweaking policy restatements, which hardly change anything, changing chairs in bureaucratic rigmaroles, or pining for the next Uncle Sam grant announcement in the Federal Register. Thus, programs are guided by money source, not fueled by meeting a felt need. Or, we engage celebrities and attempt to reach the grass roots citizenry through the gimmickry of mass media, or offer awards to the carrot-recruited bunnies of citizens’ assemblies. Person-to-person grassroots organizing has advantages, and these need to be strategically used in the transition period of deconstructing old forms as well as building the political systems of the future.

Movements as an effective means for social transformation will be the focus of premise four next week.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.