We find the United States of America in a conflux of repeating many aspects of our historical past. While 19th century race, slavery, and gender inequality is my focus, I have recently been thinking about the founding of our country in more detail to make sense of our present.
This book is worthy of a read on our history of speculation and gambling from the early founding of our country to the present. Speculation: A History of the fine line between gambling and investing by Stuart Banner.
In America: Reflections on the birth of the United States by Gordon S. Wood, Wood asks important questions about our founders and how they obtained wealth. "Because earning interest from loans was considered more genteel than most other moneymaking activities..."p.164. This practice had no political prejudge, federalist, southern planters, merchants..it did not matter. This was an income source that required no real honest work. We rarely hear of this and assume money was made by land acquisition. Reading Wood's book and Banner's book together would make for some great insights.
It seems, today, we see moneymaking activities of the same nature being not only used to extremes, but rewarded as a great accolade. The crash of 2008 is a prime example of risk being taken to abhorrable degrees of moral conduct, for greed, with our country's sovereignty as collateral. I truly believe this was the first step in degrading our value as a nation of advocacy and humanism to greed and self service. I have always believed we were more of a country that opened itself to assist than to exclude. That is no longer who we are and we have lost our way.
We have spent many, many years valuing money as a representation of identity, taking capitalism to it's worst extreme. And now we are at the conflux of whether that will remain or whether we choose another path. A path that is super scary to those who have lived in a unwritten philosophy of white male dominance without really understanding what that has meant. For some it's just how it's always been so don't rock the boat. Sorry, but the boat is shaking violently.
All of our founders where speculators, slave owners, male dominant overseers of land, money, and human beings. We can admire their fortitude, but we shouldn't forget their faults. They can still remain heroes, yet human heroes with great flaws. It would have been very hard then to fight the status quo, but we are exactly in the same situation, being forced to choose a path with greater knowledge of past mistakes at our table. We must believe in our fortitude.
Whether we like it our not, we have always been looked upon as charitable, even though in comparison we are the youth amongst older, more experienced countries. We have a ripple effect. We close our borders, the world responds. We clamp down on how we treat the poor, the gender non-conforming, the incarceration of predominantly black poor minor crimes, and the world watches and emulates. Former President Barack Obama was, in my view, very conservative fiscally, but equally very liberal socially. He was the first President to ever give a speech on LGBT rights. EVER! And, if you listen to this speech from 2010, I believe, he gave this speech as if it were just an everyday right thing to do. It was who we were, or at minimum who we should become!! I adore him for that, even if I disagreed with some of his decisions, he had my heart because he clearly showed the world who we were and it was a powerful compassionate world view that was admired by the world. He reached his hand out in peace to so many. For this, I have no doubt.
That is gone. We may be able to get it back, but it's appearing to be a very difficult struggle which is depressing. The suicide rate amongst the trans community is over 40%, the national average is between 1 and 2%. 40 frigging percent!!!!!! When you do something as simple as say a business can discriminate against someone because of their identity, you devalue "the person". When you are prejudge you see people as "it's", not humans. This has got to go from the world! When you believe no one should be protected because of their identity, you are saying you are more valuable as a human being. That is vile, pure and simple, and just not true. You are not more valuable if you are married. You are not more valuable if you are white. You are not more valuable if you are a Christian. You are not more valuable if you are straight. Stop it!!!
You can make money and value the person. You can make money and show dignity in how you treat your workers, your assistants, etc. No one becomes greater by stomping others down, yet we constantly reward those who do. If we can figure out how to stop that in small ways the ripple will spread and we will have won so much more than money can buy. Sorry...I'm a dreamer in capabilities that are endless. Dreams can come true if we share the same overall dream, which I truly believe resides in everyone's heart. Let's speculate in philanthropic human compassion, let's invest in community, then we will all be worth the gamble.
And you thought this was a post about finance, ha!
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