Third World America - Arianna Huffington [88]
Social media sites are also being used to create a sense of community to see us through these dark economic times and help us transcend feelings of being victimized and powerless. At sites such as Recessionwire.com, LayoffSupportNetwork.com, LayoffSpace.com, HowIGotLaidOff.com, and The The405Club.com, job seekers share tips about finding work and getting by, and safely voice anxieties and fears about the future. Others have reported landing jobs by using Web stalwarts such as Facebook and Twitter to informally network with friends and associates.
When television journalist Andrea McCarren was abruptly laid off from her job at ABC affiliate WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., her first move was to update her Facebook status.170 “Andrea McCarren was just laid off, and is enormously grateful for her 26-year run in television news,” she wrote. Her friends and former colleagues were immediately made aware of her job loss—and they responded with an outpouring of support, spreading the news via Twitter. “Social media, I learned that day, was like a wildfire, spreading rapidly across the Internet, with little possibility of containment,” McCarren wrote in a March 2010 piece for Nieman Reports. “My Facebook posting immediately led to a flood of phone calls, condolence e-mails, and job leads. A Facebook friend I’d met in person just one time introduced me to a high-profile CEO and entrepreneur who flew me to California for a job interview the next week. Former colleagues and even several interns I’d mentored in the past spoke to their bosses and paved my way into their news operations within days. No one was hiring but it boosted my spirits to make so many contacts.” McCarren and her husband, “awed by the compassion and kindness of Americans who wrote,” were inspired to launch Project Bounce Back, an online community centered around stories of resilience in times of economic hardship. The project eventually sent the McCarrens and their three children on the road, traveling around the country and chronicling tales of American hope and vitality.171
Taken together, these efforts, and thousands of others like them, are helping turn the country around. And it would be great if more of America’s super affluent—the wealthiest 1 percent, who hold 35 percent of the nation’s wealth—also tapped into their reserves of empathy and acted on Andrew Carnegie’s assertion that “he who dies rich dies disgraced.”172, 173
That’s a sentiment that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett clearly share. The pair has launched The Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the world’s billionaires to give at least 50 percent of their money away.174 Buffett has promised to give 99 percent of his roughly $46 billion to charity; Gates has made a similar pledge.175 And others are starting to join in, including Michael Bloomberg, who, echoing Carnegie, says: “I am a big believer in giving it all away and have always said that the best financial planning ends with bouncing the check to the undertaker.”176 If The Giving Pledge catches on, Gates and Buffett believe they can generate $600 billion for philanthropic causes.177
At the tail end of the last Gilded Age, the opulently rich—men like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew W. Mellon—led a nationwide wave of philanthropy. If Buffett and Gates are successful, as our own Gilded Age nears its end, a second great wave of giving is coming. And it couldn’t be more timely.
HOPE 2.0
The 2008 election was all about “hope.” But just hoping that our leaders in Washington will somehow miraculously start doing the right thing—especially when they are locked inside a system with overwhelmingly powerful incentives to do the wrong thing—simply won’t cut it.
What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken