I’d like to express my sincere gratitude and support to Roy R. Lindsey of Neeses for his June 15 letter to the editor titled, “It’s for the children of South Carolina.” Roy’s words go much deeper than most readers realize.

Roy exposes the growing liberal insistence of classifying everyone into neat little “groups,” such as “the children,” “the poor,” “the unfortunate,” and oh let’s not forget our disdain for “the rich.” More and more we demand that people be placed into groups and painted with broad brush definitions rather than recognize the importance, intelligence and significance of “the individual.”

Law enforcement has long recognized that personal “beat cop” efforts by police officials on the street are the best ways of dealing with community policing, rather than upper-level command making decisions from behind a desk. Our nation’s military as well has come to strongly support a “boots on the ground” mentality where commanders in the field and grunt soldiers are given greater increased responsibility, from handing out candy to assisting local community elders with immediate decision making.

Indeed, reams of scholarly papers have been written about the importance of what is called “flattened hierarchies,” even in modern business models. The concept of flattened hierarchies provides that it is the “empowered employee” working at the customer-service level of operations who is better equipped and flexible enough to deal with customer complaints and provide quick, efficient, personal customer satisfaction. Relying on upper management to make delicate decisions about customer satisfaction is now recognized as outdated and inefficient.

As any manager or leader knows, classifying one’s employees as a single entity needing to be dealt with by iron hand is wholly inefficient. We know that each and every subordinate in our charge is an individual with individual needs and intrinsic motivations. What may motivate one subordinate to perform will not motivate another. Today’s managers need to individually manage, lead and mentor each employee differently.

Roy is right! Government spending as well needs to be determined by local decisions by local leaders. Teachers need to be empowered just as employees are empowered in today’s private sector, even if that means eliminating the Department of Education and allowing local leaders to make decisions about education in their regions. By the same token, so too do parents need to be empowered in decision making.

Roy, thanks for giving us yet another example of how liberal “group” efforts to classify and identify people only serve to divide and separate, and result in inefficient use of our scarce resources.

n Keith Pounds holds an MBA with a concentration in organizational psychology. His writings can be viewed at keithpounds.com. He can be contacted at Keith.Pounds@alumni.aiuonline.edu.

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