Post #16: Challenge the Orthodoxies

Bobby Kennedy campaigning for President in 1968

I'm the first to admit it: I reacted too often in the Legislature to things I never should have concerned myself with. Bouts with Governors Sanford and Haley... squabbles with colleagues... a cheap quip when I should have kept my mouth shut. The lesson has been learned.

Those reactionary characteristics of my time in the Legislature overshadow what I am most proud of, and that was thinking in an outside-of-the-box, proactive manner when it came to crafting legislation. It's what led to my casino legislation (which creates jobs and revenue to fix roads), but it also led to things such as my ethics plan, my conservation proposals and my call for stronger domestic violence laws.

I often said South Carolina had all the tools needed to be successful, but we lacked leadership and vision. One of the key components to being a visionary is the ability to challenge the orthodoxy.

One of my favorite movies is Moneyball-- not because of the acting, but because the theme of the movie is to challenge the way the world does things. Near the end of the movie, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) goes to Boston to entertain a job offer from the Red Sox owner, John Henry. This is how Henry pitched the offer to Beane:

"I know you are taking it in the teeth, but the first guy through the wall... he always gets bloody... always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business... but in their minds, it's threatening the game. Really what it's threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It's threatening the way they do things... and every time that happens, whether it's the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins - they have their hands on the switch - they go batshit crazy."

What a quote! I have watched that clip so many times that I can nearly recite it verbatim. When I ruffled feathers for introducing casino legislation, I knew it was coming. When I introduced what was called the strongest ethics reform legislation in a generation, I knew I was going to take it on the chin, but I always drew inspiration from Robert Kennedy's famous speech in Cape Town, South Africa. Maybe my favorite part of the speech is this excerpt:

"'There is,' said an Italian philosopher, 'nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.' Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation, and the road is strewn with many dangers.
        First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills-against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's greatest movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. 'Give me a place to stand,' said Archimedes, 'and I will move the world.' These men moved the world, and so can we all."

With all of this said though, I realized how hard it is to change even one's hometown. I often remark, "I got elected thinking I could change the world, but then found out I couldn't even change my own county."  It is frustrating, but change doesn't come easily. So whatever it is, your business, your view on your community, something that you think needs to be challenged, I encourage you to saddle up and take it on. It's exhausting, but it's fun... and if you don't, you'll always regret it.