Third World America - Arianna Huffington [90]
President Obama has said that we find ourselves at “a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise.”185
So, as we stand at this inflection point and gradually move from what Jonas Salk called Epoch A (our survival-focused past) to Epoch B (our meaning-focused future), we have to ask ourselves what this remade world will look like.
Will it be a place where economic opportunity is once again real for everyone, not just the economic elite?
Will it be a place where greed and selfishness are no longer rewarded and “the least among us” are given a helping hand, rather than the back of it?
Will it be a place where bridges are fixed before they collapse, and students aren’t allowed to founder in failing schools?
Will it be a place where the public interest once again trumps the special interests, and public policy is no longer auctioned off to the highest bidder?
Will it be a place where transparency reigns and backroom deals are banished from the halls of power?
Will it be a place where Main Street replaces Wall Street as the center of the economic universe?
Will it be a place where the middle class no longer has a bull’s-eye on its back and the American Dream is more than just a hallucination or a distant memory seen only in our nation’s rearview mirror?
The choices we make—both as individuals and as a society—will determine whether America becomes a Third World country or the “more perfect union” our founding fathers envisioned.
The moment to act is now. Inflection points in history don’t come along very often.186
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Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.187
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY
So often, our desire to take action gets derailed by our uncertainty over exactly what action to take, and how to best make a difference. To bridge the gap between intention and involvement, we’ve created a section on the Huffington Post where you can find out more about what you can do to help make sure we never find ourselves living in Third World America. Go to www.huffingtonpost.com/ThirdWorldAmerica—and get involved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After finishing my twelfth book, I asked my daughters and close friends to do an intervention if I ever decided to write another one. “No more books” I promised them—and myself. No more juggling the demands of writing a book and the demands of HuffPost (now a tireless and rambunctious five-year-old that never takes a nap).
And then Richard Pine, my wonderful agent and friend, called. “Roger Scholl wants you to write a book for Crown about—” Politely but firmly, I stopped him. “I don’t want to know,” I said. “I don’t want to be tempted.” A few days later he called back and before I could stop him he told me that Roger had been reading what I’d been writing about the decline of America’s middle class and wanted me to write a book about it. The decline of the middle class was, in fact, a subject I had become obsessed with, both in my own writing and in HuffPost’s coverage of the economic crisis. We had even dedicated one of our reporters, Arthur Delaney, to the beat—putting flesh and blood on the gloomy statistics. We considered calling him our “economic suffering correspondent” but that sounded too lugubrious, so we settled on our “economic impact correspondent.”
So I went from “never again” to “how soon could we bring it out?” As for that intervention thing, I just didn’t tell my daughters or my friends what I was doing until I’d already finished the first draft. So, first of all, thank you to Michael Palgon, the deputy publisher at the Crown Publishing Group, and Editorial Director Roger Scholl for the idea—and to Michael Palgon