I can see it now — the excuse the middle school kid gives his parents when he comes home with his first report card this fall, full of failing grades:

"It's not my fault. It's 'deep institutional failure.'"

What else can we expect from our children when they see the public officials on the 9/11 commission conclude that the disaster was due to "deep institutional failure," rather than the fault of any one individual?

I wonder what President Harry Truman would have done. The ethos of this country has changed dramatically because, in Truman's day, Americans used to live by his motto: "The Buck Stops Here." It's called personal responsibility. Nowadays, the buck stops at the CIA or someplace else, but not on "my watch."

The 9/11 disaster put an exclamation point on the fact that our institutions are unable to solve today's problems. They are dying of old age because our elected leaders are unwilling to take personal responsibility to make sure they work. They blame it on "institutional failure." We elect leaders to lead and make our governmental institutions so they are responsive to our current needs. To blame problems on institutions is like blaming a runaway train for a crash, while the engineer slept at the controls.

The 9/11 commission further concluded that there was a "failure of imagination" in providing Bush or Clinton with new options to deal with the threats. That misplaces the responsibility. The "failure of imagination" is not due to the people hired to run the institutions, rather the elected leader who has the responsibility to lead.

It is the responsibility of leaders to have an understanding of how society is changing, the causes and where we are headed. They must provide a vision of where we "ought" to be going and what needs to be done. That's imagination! And it starts at the top. It requires that leaders articulate what is in the hearts and minds of people, be able to offer a vision and hope for a better tomorrow and a plan to make it happen.

That is not the case today. We now have leaders who refer everything to another committee, task force or commission for further study. The idea is that by referring it for further study the final answer will emerge, or people will forget about the problem; that is until another public disaster or public outcry. Then they blame the study committee and cry "institutional failure" or "failure of imagination." The idea is to "pass the buck" around so the responsibility is so diffused that everyone, and no one, can be held accountable. The culprit is "deep institutional failure."

In the meantime, the bureaucracy continues to trudge along, doing business as usual. When disaster strikes, the bureaucratic response is to flip through the volumes of policy manuals to make sure applicable procedures were followed. In the meantime, our elected leaders wait for "actionable intelligence" — an excuse to do nothing and blame it on the amorphous "institution."