Archives
Bradley closes lecture series
Former senator has listeners laughing before getting to business
By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
With a hilarious tale of an overzealous basketball fan who threatened to kill the dog he didn't have and stories of dim-witted politicians, former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley clearly has overcome any limitations in connecting to a crowd.
BRADLEY
Bradley, the final speaker of the year's Distinguished Speakers Series who was, at one time, so concerned about his inability to communicate to large groups that he cloistered himself in the Library of Congress with Elvis films to study the King's charisma, drew raucous laughter for the first 15 or so minutes of his lecture before getting down to the business of the economy, globalization and technological change and what Americans' moral and personal responsibility might be in those areas.
The former NBA star, Rhodes scholar, Olympian and presidential candidate said that while he's certain that the economy will rebound (he just didn't know when), he doesn't want Americans to make the same mistake they did during the booming 1990s—giving in to rampant greed and disregarding the societal problems that engulf many Americans.
His worry? That the near 44 million uninsured Americans and the 13 million children living in poverty will continue to remain invisible in good times and bad. Only a personal sense of moral responsibility toward these groups, combined with an economy that raises the standard of living for everyone, can change that, Bradley said.
In spite of his sports background, Bradley is not a "put up or shut up" kind of guy who lives by the eternal and clichéd sports analogies used ad nauseum by motivational speakers—he's a self-professed idealist who advocates introspection, in spite of his time in the U.S. Senate. His vision includes a pluralistic democracy that is formed from the strength of the ethnic diversity that shapes America.
Strong leadership and "allies, allies, allies" are key to homeland security, as well as keeping pace with globalization and technological advances, said Bradley, who reminded the audience that there's always been globalization—remember Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus?
And the best example of strength of diversity?
"I recently read a story in a newspaper about a restaurant in Houston, Texas, owned by Korean-Americans who employed Mexican-American laborers to prepare Chinese-style food for a predominately African-American clientele," he said.
With more Muslims living in the U.S. than Presbyterians and the fact that more than one third of Internet start-up companies during the 1990s were founded by people of Asian descent, it's easy to see how a young Indian boy can be inspired, halfway around the world, by American leaders in the field of technology, Bradley explained.
Yet, those same impulses toward globalization and technological change also can create the terrorist cells that brought down the World Trade Center towers in September 2001, requiring Americans to accept a "higher degree of security in our lives," he said.
Democracy, Bradley noted, "needs to be more responsive" to a changing populace to combat voter apathy. Good leadership in a democracy depends upon setting a personal example, being willing to hold moral values and beliefs, and participation in a nation-wide dialogue on what is considered to be "good times," Bradley said.
"One billion more people are living in a global market than a decade ago, more people are living outside their birth country than ever before and advances in computer technology have been so exponential that if the automotive industry had kept pace with it, one could drive from Buffalo to Los Angeles on four milliliters of gasoline," Bradley said about the pace of change in society.
And, he pointed out, it's up to Americans to determine for themselves just what values of importance they will attach to those changes.