Our current selection is Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith. I know we are going to learn a lot from the book and have much to discuss with the author on our conference call on Sunday, June 19th at 7 pm EST.
While you are getting started with the book, I was eager to share the TEDxOrcasIsland talk that Hedrick gave last year, entitled “Can We Heal Our Great Divide?” In his talk he lays out his economic theory of what has gone wrong and what we can do about it. He speaks abuot how we have seen a “revolt of the bosses, a revolt from the top down.” He links rebuilding the American economy to reclaiming our democracy and talks about the need to end gerrymandering, expose dark money and the value of Top Two primaries. And that it is up to the American people, from the bottom up to do this. Hedrick reminds us that American history shows us that we can make transformative change happen…look at the revolutionary war, the women’s movement, the 60’s. He goes on to speak about the power of the civil rights movement. He shares:
I remember when Martin Luther King put on his coveralls–he didn’t just give that speech at the Lincoln Memorial–he put on his coveralls, went out and got arrested. And they denounced him as an outside agitator. That was meant as a diss, an epithet, a denunciation…. Yes, he said, I am an agitator. Look in your washing machine, there’s an agitator in the center and it’s agitating the water and the soap to knock the dirt out of your clothes. And I’m here to agitate the dirt out of our society–racism, discrimination, segregation.”
Hedrick goes on to say,
I think we need a new spirit of agitation in America. We need a new generation of agitators, and I don’t mean just the young generation. I mean all of us generations together. We can do it.”
I hope you will give his talk a listen.
If you cannot view the video, you can see it here.
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