Can America have a beautiful future? Visionary strategies are needed.

• Author: Ziegenfuss, James T., Jr.

PARENTS should be able to answer the deceptively simple, but often hard questions their children ask. How can they respond to "What will America be like when I grow up?" Do Americans believe that the years ahead will be seared by conflict and environmental disintegration or marked by beauty and prosperity? Or worse, do they have no vision at all?

As this century closes, the nation's leaders must address specific domestic and international problems:

* Homeless people live on the streets, sheltered by cardboard and scavenging for food in trash cans.

* Children face violence and fear in school.

* Many people are without health care in a nation with the most advanced medical technologies and personnel in the world.

* Tyrants continue to oppress the people of Third World nations, threatening regional peace while torturing the innocent.

* Struggling new democracies in Eastern Europe ask for help--a request the U.S. has been hoping to see for decades.

Responses to all of these issues are needed, but where is the country's leadership? On its cover, Time magazine headlined: "Is Government Dead? Unwilling to Lead, Politicians Are Letting America Slip into Paralysis."

The Founding Fathers had vision. Codified as Articles of Confederation and a Bill of Rights, these design guides collectively offered support for the birth of a nation. Several hundred years later, though, it seems that we embrace the future by attacking issues in a disconnected fashion--one at a time, without a sense of the whole. Moreover, there seems to be no feeling for which problems should be solved first.

How can the problem-solving actions be woven into a coherent tapestry--an attainable vision of a desirable future? All U.S. leaders--public, private, community, even academic--presume to know what the nation would like to become and the best strategies for taking it there, but are they fully informed?

Since citizens do not discuss systematically what they would like America's future to be, leaders assume they know, or guess, or both. The expected match between the desired future and leadership toward that goal seems a gamble too much driven by luck.

We are asked to choose among alternate paths to the country's future (i.e., more government or less; environment vs. jobs) and even different futures. However, the path is unmarked and the destinations often are unknown.

Individuals have limited methods for communicating their visions, hopes, and aspirations. Sometimes the situation seems to be that our leaders talk at us, but do not listen to us. Endless government reports and speeches, corporate strategic plans, and educators' lectures on American history are independent disconnected thoughts and actions that would have people re-engineering the country one part at a time. This approach has failed for companies, schools, and hospitals struggling to define their destinies. Many leaders and citizens want to improve America's prospects, but they face a dilemma: There are no means to foster clear and connected visions for the decades ahead.

It is time to cultivate a national effort to create visions of America's future. In corporations, communities, schools, and government agencies, leaders, citizens, teachers, and students can contribute their ideas and dreams to establish where the...