Our Patriotic Motive

LEO’s management is committed to improving leaders throughout our nation and world.  However, recent scandals and crises in the United States lead us to focus on helping our country’s leaders to help, not harm, the people in our land.  LEO loves America.

Past generations built the institutions we whatever is good in our nation.  We are reminded of Norman Rockwell’s famous series of paintings on The Four Freedoms.

Freedom of Speech         Freedom to Worship          Freedom from Want          Freedom from Fear

20 February 1943              27 February 1943              6 March 1943                   13 March 1943

Art critics in the 1960s criticized Rockwell as a paid sentimentalist.  He was not.  When we look at the good, honest faces he portrayed, we see how he tried to represent the American character as he knew it.  He knew the ugly chapters in American history, but showed the decency and dignity of millions who came from all over the world as immigrants seeking freedom.  Despite our current crises, Rockwell’s vision sees the good we all should see.  American greatness lies best in its greatest citizens, and these are average people.

Millions of good Americans in every generation--of every nation, race, religion, language, condition, and capacity—paid for the freedom we enjoy today.  They paid with daily honest labor.  They saved, they built, and they passed on a legacy for their children and grandchildren.  They paid with their blood on battlefields.  They fought bravely during World War II, so their families, and strangers abroad, would enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Millions overseas remember how American strangers sacrificed for their freedom, and how America provided the Marshall Plan to do what no other victorious nation ever had done.

During the last presidential election, a majority of Americans elected an African American.  Regardless of the reader’s political party or feelings on current politics, that election showed how even a nation with our scarred and divided racial history could move in a new direction.  The world noted this, as did the Nobel Committee, as a testament to the vitality of our democracy.  There are many things gone awry in our country, but we are capable of great things.

We saw again the character of America after September 11, 2001.  All Americans united in compassionate response to that tragedy to retrieve the injured and dead, to comfort the grieving, and later, to defend against terrorism.  The United States of America has more enemies today than Al-Qaida.     

Material Enemies – Whatever Americans learned regarding unity and national sacrifice during World War II, they forgot in the decades of economic growth afterwards.  Consumption, consumerism, credit card debt, home equity loans, high-risk financial schemes by banks and investment institutions, government deficit spending, all are “chickens come home to roost.” Added to these problems are an aging population, aging infrastructure, and even issues of basic water and soil conservation for survival.  America has many enemies here of our own making.

Psychological Enemies – Americans today suffer fear, despair, anxiety, emotional trauma, depression, suspicion, blame, paranoia, unrelieved aggression, psychological inversion, and a cascade of mental illnesses, growing from our current crises.  These inner enemies affect our abilities to think, react emotionally in healthy ways, and behave in our families, workplaces, and political system.  There are some, here and abroad, who manipulate our psychological vulnerabilities.  Many Americans do not understand the profound significance of their inner enemies, though they exist.  If our nation was built on hope and dreams for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” we are at risk from despair that decline is determined and imminent.

LEO educates American leaders in all walks of life to love themselves, their families, workplaces, society, and nation.  LEO teaches that self-love, love for our families, organizations, society, national heritage, and democratic institutions, all require healthy self-regulation in thinking, emotions, and behaviors.

Because our nation’s problems are complex, our corporate work offers no simplistic solutions.  We help leaders understand problems within themselves; problems in their organizations; and the unlearning, re-learning, and practice needed to be healed, healthy, productive, and realistically and pragmatically hopeful for a new day.

We close with an excerpt from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The Colossus.” The following words are emblazoned on a plaque at the base of The Statue of Liberty.  Lazarus’s words capture the American Spirit that Norman Rockwell portrayed in his Four Freedoms series, and that LEO knows still exists in our general fellow citizens.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she  
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,  
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,  
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.  
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,  
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

LEO exists to promote this American Spirit through all we do.  We ask all Americans citizens, and all people of good will around the world, in all nations, to unite with us, to use us, for good purposes.  It remains for us, the living, to turn up the flame and hold high The Lamp of Liberty for our children and grandchildren, and all who love freedom!