Excellent "America will survive" post from Robert Reich on his 79th birthday

[Pluvious]

IMHO the most profound insight from his piece :

We let inequality get out of control

The post is mostly Q and A quotes from a group discussion with some of his graduate students...

Do you remember anything as bad as what’s now happening to America?

1968 was almost as bad. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Our cities were in flames. Tens of thousands of us were being drafted and sent to Vietnam. The Democratic convention in Chicago was a disaster — National Guard teargassing young people. And Richard Nixon was elected president. I thought the nation would never recover.

...

My parents’ generation bequeathed my generation a great legacy. They had endured the Great Depression and won World War II. They gave us peace, prosperity, and the largest middle class the world had ever seen. What did we do with that legacy? We squandered it. Oh, we accomplished some good things. But we took the system for granted. We let big money take it over. We let inequality get out of control. We allowed big corporations to become monopolies. We abandoned the working class. We allowed distrust and cynicism to sprout like poisonous mushrooms.

And that led to Trump?

It made America susceptible to a so-called “strong man” demagogue.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/a-conversation-on-my-79th

(And of course, I loved his Grateful Dead reference near the end)

[EverHopeful]

1. So like that one about

If you're ever feeling sad, just remember, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and you managed to exist at the same as Jerry Garcia, wouldn't probably mean much to them.

This just made me grateful to be this old🙂