Well good morning and let me welcome us to a new year, a new beginning, a new set of chains to use a football metaphor. I took a short break from blogging during the holidays and getting my classes knitted together and launched yesterday and am very pleased with both groups of young minds I will get to watch grow and expand during this semester. It is going to be a great one I believe.
There are, as always, a myriad of thoughts flooding my brain but the tent pole I will tap into the ground will have its bedrock with the Alabama / LSU contest for the BCS National Championship played last night. So many emotions, thoughts and wonderments triggered by that game but for me it was less about the game and more about the horrific scenes we have mostly forgotten at that Superdome during the hell of Katrina. We were all transported to a third world country as we watched helplessly as the thousands being driven into that same venue we saw so spectacularly last evening. As I watched the cheering and at times jeering fans last night, my mind was racing back to the stench, fear and sense of devastation that sat and lived in those same seats such a short time ago.
But then the parallel hit me like a brick! This is a nation that can take a licking and keep on ticking we used to hear on an old watch commercial. When the aerial camera would pan the glimmering of the Big Easy and the Mighty Mississippi winding her way through that glimmer, it caused my brain to replay the hues of anguish that were created in a relatively few hours on a people that, to some degree, are no doubt still recovering. We see the bright, happy BP commercials now about how wonderful things are along the Gulf Coast, that they, BP, are there for the long haul, we see the throngs of people flooding Bourbon Street, etc. But just under all the gleam, for me at least, New Orleans is a microcosm of our nation but also our world.
The today Katrina is the Noah-level flooding of sovereign debt, the near collapse of the single currency as a result unfolding in Europe. We see the great economic engines of China and India and Brazil cooling down which means dire predictions for a teetering economy in the US and Europe. I am still amazed by the prognosticators that hearken to go back to the 1950s, "Buy American", reduce the military, fight no more except in the streets of the US, lessen the strategic footprint of the US and see never ending campaign cycles instead of really governing. That is all our Katrina if you roll it all into a collage!
So the question! What will it take to restore the gleam we relished and took for granted in our country for that gleam is surely dampened and dimmed as never before in my lifetime. I addressed nearly one hundred students yesterday, many of them freshly out of high school beginning their collegiate journey. As I spoke and moved around the classroom, my mind kept being transfixed by the global wall map in the room and realized all over again that these young minds will fight their career struggles, successes, loses, etc, against that map representing the GLOBAL economy. That was never even a thought when I sat in those chairs at 18 years old in the mid 1960s. We were fighting a war in Vietnam yes and I was losing friends there which I could not really grasp but as to a job; certainly not a problem.
This young minds are facing a world of enhanced technologies in all sectors of industry. Technology is designed to spawn efficiency which translates to fewer jobs. That is the WHY the job market continues to stagnate for industry, rightly, has spent its capital in the recession period on technology to reduce the need for manpower; it really is that simple and it will not change. So the world in 2012 for these one hundred young, smart minds is a very different world from my mind in 1966. As I told both classes yesterday, the days of when a piece of paper called a college degree assured one of a good job are, well, not there. Students today have to get that piece of paper which almost, barely, gets them even with millions of students globally. So students today must not only perform academically very well but must further differentiate themselves from the competitive forces of the labor market in any way they can. It really is that simple! Just getting a degree, while admirable, requires much more in the days ahead. Students today are competing with students all over this world that are multi-languaged, more voracious in their assault for an education. My many Asian students present that very demeanor in every case I have had them in classes. They are "hungry" for knowledge on a scale I see very infrequently in their American counterparts.
So in closing, how does America take the Katrina hit, reinvigorate, rise above the flood waters and destruction and establish that grand American glimmer we all want to see again? It begins with leadership of our nation and it is there my greatest concern resides. I see no real, credible, forward thinking charismatic leaders; just professional campaigners beholden to lobbyist, PACs and now SuperPACs, MONEY$$$$.
Can America reestablish ourselves? Certainly but it begins with one and cascades to each of us in this GLOBAL village pulling more closely together. More than every before, WE NEED EACH OTHER!
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