Are We Awakening Yet?

It’s Monday morning! Happy Monday to all! ッ And as every morning I start my day with reading. This week reading a macroeconomist, focused on explaining the root causes of where we are now and a proponent of a mixed economy, in short a regulated free-market economy that can better provide efficiency, fairness and sustainability -as opposed to the fairly unbridled, unregulated free market economy. This totally free market economy mentality sprung in the 70s and has failed to ensure fairness and sustainability (is there a need to remind people of the difference between the 1% and the rest?). On that I totally agree and actually after more than 20 years in the guts of ‘the’ Corporate world I am personally not impressed with its efficiency either -quite the opposite. As for our politicians: on many days it seems that the only difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that Big Oil owns the Republicans while Wall Street owns the Democrats. 

I agree that too many of America’s elites—among the super rich, the CEOs (and even in the Academia)—have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility, favoring extreme individualism. They chase wealth and power, the rest of the society be damned. “We need to reconcile the idea of a good society and find creative path toward it. Most important, we need to be ready to pay the price of civilization through multiple acts of good citizenship: bearing our fair share of taxes, educating ourselves about society’s needs, acting as vigilant stewards for future generations, and remembering that compassion is the glue that holds society together.” (Jeffrey Sachs in ‘The Price of Civilization’ 2011). 

I am happy to see that I am far from being the only one raising the need for empathy and compassion in our world, our society, our life. Although 6 years after writing his book, we’re heading in the opposite direction… Instead of compassion, we’ve chosen to elect a bunch of hateful, racist and bigot billionaires who are only interested in dividing politics, grabbing lands and taking care of their own super rich, deepening the inequalities among the people, furthering the assaults on the environment. It does not look like the people are taking this lightly: maybe there is an awakening? Maybe some of his supporters are realizing that “Trump love” is not love after all? So hopefully (we) the people are going to put an end to this very quickly… 

This being said, time to get my to my civic actions of the day before going back to EwA work! Again: Happy Monday to all! ッ