Tom Brokaw didn’t talk about how to make money in his speech to direct marketers on Monday. He talked about how to save our civilization.
The war against terrorism the United States entered after 9/11 is really “a war of cultures,” said the NBC anchor, in a sobering, elegantly written speech that brought the reality of world events into the conference hall.
The cultural divide has been exacerbated by the invasion of Iraq. The Western Alliance is deeply divided “in a world where too many young Moslems in too many places strap weapons to their bodies and turn themselves into weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
Brokaw said he’s spent a lot of time in Iraq, and recalled meeting a group of young college graduates who were as enthusiastic about Whitney Houston and James Taylor as they were about joining the army and killing Americans.
Why? They love the U.S., he said, but despise “our arrogance and abuse of power.”
Soon Moslems in the world will outnumber Christians, he cautioned. “No army can kill them all, so we have to start trying to understand them…to battle for their hearts and minds.”
He charged the business leaders in the room to seize the opportunity for change. “It will do us little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our own souls.”
Using his book about the World War II generation as a backdrop, Brokaw charged his audience with permitting a range of viewpoints to be heard in society. The airwaves are monopolized by what he called “food fights that create a discourse that causes a kind of jihad against opposing views,” he said.
A private citizen in a democracy should be able to raise a voice of dissension without being shouted down, Brokaw added.
Disallowing many voices not the lesson of the generation that lived through the Great Depression and a world war, he said. “We have no obligation but to enlist as citizens again.”
