WHAT ARE YOU HOPING FOR, DREAMING ABOUT, ANGRY ABOUT?
Please share your story in the comments box below.
I am in my 80’s. My wife and I have lived, raised our family and practiced our careers in a time of prosperity. I hope my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will also be able to pursue the American dream in a time of prosperity.
Because the pillars of our prosperity are endangered today, I am very worried that my progeny will not enjoy the blessing I have enjoyed.
The first pillar of our prosperity has been our climate.
In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval NoahHarari, asserts that we are living in the Holocene period when Earth’s climate has been nearly ideal to support unbelievable human progress. He warns “…..our best scientific estimates indicate that unless the emission of greenhouse gases are decreased in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons. These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes. Moreover, we might perish in the process of adaptation.” (Harari, p. 116-118)
The second pillar is infrastructure.
In his book, THE RISE AND FALL OR AMERICAN GROWTH, Robert J. Gordon writes, “The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day.”
Our country was about midpoint in this revolution when people my age were taking our first breaths of clean American air! We were born in the middle of an economic revolution that was “freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death.”
Some of us remember the outhouse. Others may remember their clothing being made as their mothers pedaled the singer sewing machine. Still others may remember the telephone and cars you started with a crank. Some may remember the excitement of the first electric light in their home. “Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition.
Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. [It is greater now.] The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”
The other name for the results of this revolution is infrastructure. This infrastructure was a significant foundation of our prosperity. This is the infrastructure that is now in disrepair because of decades of congressional gridlock.
The third pillar of our prosperity is capitalism. The capitalism that supported us as we completed our educations and began our careers is not the same as the capitalism that reigns today. Paul Collier’s in The Future of Capitalism asserts that our Politian’s governed with a practical policy agenda that addressed the anxieties of ordinary families.
Missing in our government today are elected representatives compromising to address the anxieties of their constituents with practical policy enacted into law.
I dream that these pillars of prosperity are restored for all American children including my own.
But the gridlock must be broken by electing representatives that will see that the agenda of the American majority is adopted.
WHAT ARE YOU HOPING FOR, DREAMING ABOUT, ANGRY ABOUT?
Please share your story in comments below.
