When I was taken to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 as a 9-year-old growing up outside Springfield, the Merritt Parkway was not finished, and there was no tunnel under West Rock. One of the most exciting exhibits at the fair was General Motors’ vision of highway travel in 1960, a multi-lane highway network that presaged — and probably helped inspire — the Interstate Highway System we all take for granted today.
Like 1960 and 2000, the year 2020 is supposed to be another of those landmark years when lots of significant things change for the better. Truth be told, I cannot remember what this vision of the future beholds, having been so utterly captured by predictions of impending climate change disasters; history-making, unfair elections that could save or forever doom the American Republic and its supposedly democratic, rule-of-law political system once so admired around the world; the trade-war-related end of the American-led International Order that came out of the Bretton Woods Agreements in the 1940s; the resurgence of a nasty, angry, racially hatred-inspired nationalism so prevalent in the Europe of the time between the two great wars; the massive incompetence of federal government leadership so prominently on display in Washington, London, and elsewhere; and all the other ills of our times (we can all name our current favorite soapbox subjects).
You can see that I am struggling to put a New Year’s resolution spin on the times and troubles we currently find ourselves in. But let me give it a try.
There is no doubt that communities all around our nation have discovered the importance and effectiveness of working together locally, in the absence of national leadership. Detroit is perhaps a prime example, and there are many others. As James Fallows and his wife Deborah have so convincingly expressed in their book “Our Towns: A Journey into the Heart of America” — “the most positive and practical developments in this stage of American life are happening at the local and regional level.”
In a fascinating opinion piece in the Dec. 29 Sunday New York Times, Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, predicts that the 2020s decade will see globalization give way gradually to localization, rising buy-local movements, and the opportunities internet platforms provide for small businesses to build exciting new brands without massive TV advertising budgets.
Our 2018 elections clearly show that young people — women, people of color, followers of other-than-Christian religions — are willing to show up, run for office, work for candidates, get behind reforms and new political ideas (i.e.: take their citizenship seriously).
In Greenfield, you can’t pick up an issue of the Recorder that doesn’t describe at least one instance of groups or individuals who are trying to do something for the welfare of others. Bravo for them!
Our newly elected mayor clearly understands the importance of new, small, entrepreneurial local business. And, hopefully, she recognizes the business and employment opportunities that can be created when educated younger people with new business ideas can be attracted to relocate to smaller, friendlier, less expensive local communities such as Franklin County offers, rather than remain in large, crowded, expensive cities they no longer need in order to succeed.
I believe America has a unique opportunity to reform itself from the ground up, from Greenfield to Boston to Washington. I believe that our current political, economic and cultural dysfunctiionalities are a massive wake-up call.
We just have to open our eyes to the potential we have as Americans; to the realization that we’ve done it all before — in the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, in our revolutionary response to the Great Depression called the New Deal — under much more difficult conditions, when our technology, financial resources, scientific knowledge and brain power were a small fraction of what we have and what we know today. And that we have the resolve and willpower to do it again.
[I believe the next decade will have a new, simple guiding energy: Let’s get at it ourselves!
Ron Nelson is a retired advertising copywriter and corporate speech writer living in Greenfield.