Articles on PR for People

Leadership is a big buzzword for the Twenty-First Century. You hear about leadership everywhere in books, and in all forms of the media. Consultants peddle “authentic” leadership as if it is a commodity that has been packaged and branded. But there is no second-guessing the real thing. Real leadership doesn’t have to be packaged and branded; you know it when you see it. 

I met Love 22 during my senior year at the University of Rhode Island. Love 22 slid unannounced into my life on a blustery day in November. He looked like he had been blown like a tumbleweed across the campus quadrangle. The sun was hidden behind a blank slate of sky. Wind sheared through the tops of plain grey trees that had shed their leaves.

A big windstorm blew a massive tree trunk onto the beach. Looks like the stump of a redwood to me. After a good rain falls, the tree’s wet wood takes on the reddish glow of a slow flame. When the full sun appears in a dry blue sky, the wood turns grey and withers, throwing off splinters like wiry strands in an old man’s beard. In case you didn’t know, I’m standing with sand in my shoes on the windswept Oregon coast.

Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” depicts the world of over a hundred years ago, a world long gone.  Told within the context of New York Society, circa 1870s, Oppression and Competition are the twin symptoms of the malaise of the times.  Oppression rears its head in the form of pervasive social niceties–people are so nice and polite, but it’s all a sham. While people behave conventionally, their false fronts and facades conceal their true feelings that roil beneath the surface in a toxic stew of despair. Despite all of the fashionable frippery...