A Rant and Some Resolution For Business Owners

Sometimes, when we have time to digest the 24/7 information explosion that has unfortunately become the norm, you have to say to yourself, “what are we doing!” The proverbial ‘WE,’ meaning ‘WE’ as a society appear to be so lost, out of control, disoriented, discombobulated, immune, unaffected and cynical, that even the most horrific of circumstances that we encounter fail to make an emotional dent in our daily lives.

We seem to have come to the conclusion, if we are not immediately impacted, that there is no consequence. Natural disasters, sad, but unless we are the victim, oh well… Genocide, terrible, but if it isn’t happening to us, oh well… National monetary default, we don’t really understand how it affects us so, oh well… Incurable viruses in other countries, killing thousands of people, oh well… Civil rights, human rights, equality, gender, racial issues, all receive the same response, oh well… What, if anything, captures our attention? If something actually happens to capture our attention, what do we do?

What Will We Do?

I expect that for the vast majority the answer is, as little as possible, to include doing nothing at all. I know that this is a very pessimistic view of our commitment to social responsibility, but consider the following:

1.  Poverty

We live in the world’s wealthiest nation and, yet, approximately 50 million people go hungry. We pay taxes that support Federal, State, and Local programs, which provide vital nutrition to the most needy and then we’ll turn on the television, grab a slice of pizza and a cold beer, without another thought.

2.  Discrimination

98 percent of all Americans feel that there is some discrimination in the United States today. Watch dog regulatory agencies, like the EEOC, make it expensive to discriminate, but they do not address the core issue of ethnic and gender isolation that remains prevalent in our society. The events of recent months in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City will produce headlines for a few more weeks and then, sadly, disappear from our collective conscious.

3.  Morality Conflicts

Abortion, LGBT relations, physician assisted suicide, medical marijuana and a host of other activities greatly divide the American social conscious. If we have learned anything from our own history, we should know that attempting to police the morality is a futile endeavor; yet, we consistently spend gazillions of dollars trying to enforce our self-righteous indignation, and accomplish nothing.

4.  Illegal Immigration

We are a nation of immigrants, we always have been and looking back at our history it is one of the more important reasons for our collective success. We are facing a deep decline of our workforce via declining birthrates. More importantly, we face the rising expectations of a disgruntled and disenfranchised labor force. So what’s the big deal with letting the immigrants do the tough jobs, anyway? Are the undocumented aliens going to take jobs from our citizens, or is it that they pose a serious threat to our security, or could it be the possibility that they will bankrupt our social insurance institutions? Even those ‘build-a-fence mentalities’ understand the impracticalities of that construction project. So we wallow in the quagmire indecision and do nothing constructive.

5.  Education

Babysitting our kids through high school means that colleges and universities have to teach them what they should have learned in high school, before they can begin the substantive college curriculum. The result is degree escalation; a Bachelors degree has become insignificant and a Masters degree is required. The resulting exorbitant expense of education is crippling our graduates. We need to level the playing field by reducing the cost of education and restoring the significance of a Bachelors degree, embracing the reality that higher education is not a right, but a privilege. We do not have the intestinal fortitude to make these changes, so we have encouraged the costs to escalate by our indifference and the system to crumble under its own weight.

6.  Infrastructure of Highways, Bridges, Dams, Rails

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the U.S. a D+ for the state of its infrastructure. About $4 trillion dollars in repairs and new construction is needed to prevent further decline. The current administration has underfunded the repairs to our nation’s public roadways by about 80 billion dollars. The average age of our bridges stands at approximately 42 years and they were designed to last 50 years. 30 percent of those structures are already over 50 years old. It will take $120 billion to fix them and we only spend about $12 billion, annually. Levees that hold back the major flood events that we experience need an investment of a trifling $100 billion. We have approximately 84,000 dams and 20 percent of those are deficient or hazardous. Drinking water, public sewers, and electricity will cost us approximately a cool trillion to repair over the next twenty years. Is anybody concerned?

7.  Freedom of Speech

The digital revolution in Social Media and the concept of net neutrality should be about more than the business bottom line (resulting in access being denied or restricted by big business Internet gatekeepers). The concept of an impartial media has long disappeared with facts being distorted to fit political agendas, or big business PR spin, rather than a search for truth. Be careful, if you are able to find some truth, you might want to keep it to yourself, least you appear on a watch list tomorrow.

8.  Individual Liberties

Same sex marriage, abortion, marijuana, government monitoring are but a few of these hot topics and the ACLU can better brief you on the constant vigilance required to maintain those essential freedoms. We know from past experience that Archie and Edith are alive and well, and, in fact, eerily resembled most of us.

9.  Religious Intolerance

Muslims, Jews and other religious minorities are subject to hate crimes and intolerance despite our constitutional protection for religious freedom via the first amendment. Being one of the founding tenets of our country, you would think it that would get more than lip service and a holiday. Equally, troubling is the continued debate over the separation between Church and state, which is really a debate over whether affluent families will convince the rest of us to contribute towards the exorbitant tuition charged by private religious based schools. What a crock! Some poor chicken farmer in Arkansas has to help out some suburban significant send his kids to a private school; how special and, yet, does anybody really care?

10.  Racism and Gender Inequality

White, Black, Asian, Latino, American Indian, transsexuals, homosexuals, men and women still strive to have equal opportunity and rather than seeing improvements, we clutter their path with boulders preserving the status quo, ceilings of glass, and fear of retaliation for demanding the promise of our heritage. Does anybody mind that our daughters are doomed for second-tier salaries? Should parents give up on achieving equality and just tell their children to be satisfied with that minimum wage job? What about sexual preference limiting job choices?

What are we doing; something, anything, nothing? Should we being doing something? Can we afford to do something, anything, or nothing? The point is that ‘WE,’ as a society, have many of the same problems, which existed 100, 200, 300 years ago. One would have thought that we could have solved a few of these by now.

One Resolution—Make America GREAT, Again!

We have become so enthralled with our own self-image that we cannot bear to face the reality that we have become a nation of wimps! We don’t fight when they behead our citizens; we only commit to measured actions, so as to limit our involvement. Yet, we will fight to protect our interests in their oil! We won’t commit to infrastructure repairs, but we will pay to clean up after a disaster! We like bombastic speechifying, extolling the greatness of our nation and its citizens, but we vilify those that choose to practice their own morality. We are the largest collection of hypocrites in the world and there is no pride in that fact.

This year, 2015, is the year to take action, to fight against injustice and intolerance. Make it your resolution to start within your own community and workplace. If every small business owner took a stand, we could transform our country. Small businesses are the backbone of the nation’s economy, as the largest employers, we are boots on the ground, the occupying force. We, the concerned citizens who can make a difference, should make a difference.

It is time to improve our businesses, expand, hire, and fuel economic growth as well as tackle social ills that have become part of the political agenda. The change starts with us. In the same way that we’re too busy ‘working in’ our business to ‘work on’ our business, we need to step back, step up, and make time to improve our country. Restore pride, commit to change, make a difference, remember who we are, Americans!

Photo credit (Liberty Bell): Racheal Grazias / Shutterstock.com