Sara and I attended the American Council of Engineering Companies of Mississippi 2009 Engineering Excellence Awards program in Jackson, MS tonight. I was a judge for the projects entered into the competition and was invited and recognized for my service. The judging was fun and the program was good. The food was great and I did get to see many of my friends, some whom I have not seen in a while.

The guest speaker was Andy Taggart, former Chief of Staff for Governor Kirk Fordice and author of Mississippi Fried Politics: Tall Tales from the Back Rooms and Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006, who delivered a moving talk entitled “Rebuilding An Economy When the Politics are Cracked.”

He began by pointing out how he learned as a supervisor that it was common for local elected officials to fill potholes and overlay bad roads near election time. The problem is that if the road base has failed, there is no amount of work that can be done on the surface that will last. Any repairs are short-lived. The real fix has to be a repair of the base.

He then went on to say that Americans have been moving from crisis to crisis for the last several years. In 2006 it was terrorism and the government limited what we could carry onboard a plane. In 2007 it was the Iraq war. In the summer of 2008 it was gas prices and then in September 2008 it was the economy that had everyone concerned. He argued that we need to ensure our base is in good shape.

Years ago Taggart pointed out, I was common for people to have heated debates and arguments but still be friends. Now if someone disagrees with you it is because you are a bad person. We have lost some civility in our daily discourse. Taggart says our base is really summed in what he calls one of the most elegant passages in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This, the second sentence from the Declaration of Independence, sums up what our base is. Taggart says we need to keep this in mind as we go through the next few years and remember what it is that makes us Americans and what has ensured our success as a nation in the past.