Let the celebration, or the trepidation, begin. The next 100 years starts now. Though we are a hopeful society, our optimistic culture will be challenged in the next 100 years like never before. We are a culture created by risk takers, who uprooted themselves from the old country and dared face an unknown frontier to build a better life. Are we still up to the challenge?
As the city moves into a second century, many would justifiably question if the dream for a better future for our children will come to pass. Sometimes I think that we are riding a broken down bus heading to a gulley, that if we don't steer it right and quickly, we will find ourselves on the side of the road watching the rest of the world passing us by.
We ended the year with our local City Council session holding the most bizarre dialogue a dynamic community can have: How can we save our most menial jobs for U.S. residents? Is this a question that belongs in a competitive society? How has it come to be that our local and national dialogue is now reduced to bickering over jobs that can be done by an immigrant with barely an eighth-grade education who can hardly communicate effectively in English? It is absurd. At a time when every well-paying knowledge job can be decomposed, digitized and transmitted to India, we are concerned about saving low-skill, low-paying jobs. How crazy is that? Today, we can take your redundant accounting job, architectural drawing, or computerized axial tomography scan analysis and have it fulfilled abroad overnight cheaper and faster.
