I wrote this while still in shock after the 2016 Presidential election.

January, 2017.

We baby boomers were born in an idyllic period of good economic times and heady optimism of our place in the world. We grew up thinking this is the way the world is, forever.

When our last great president was murdered in the streets of Dallas, our world ended, though we may not have perceived it that way at the time.

Then came Vietnam, two more murders of great men, Watergate, hostages, and oil shocks. Our incomes stopped growing like before. And there seemed to be a lot more millionaires around. But we soldiered forward, went to work, started families.

Then social issues, which used to be considered a person’s private business, entered politics, and new divisions were forever opened.

In the 1990’s we heard a fellow named Osama Bin Laden had established a training camp in Afghanistan. Bill Clinton tried to stop him, and when that failed there was no political will to do more.

September 11 was not just a dagger through our hearts, but also our souls. We watched helplessly as our nation became untethered from many of the principles that made us great. Our nation’s leaders failed us, unleashing unspeakable carnage, secret CIA torture centers, world-wide terrorism, and a flood, a tidal wave, of traumatized soldiers.

Still we kept going, those of us lucky enough still to be mentally and physically capable. But now we were being seduced by the siren song of easy credit. Our debt loads increased, but we kept going, because everyone knew your house would go up in value forever. We looked the other way as big banks got bigger and created products no one understood.

The crash of 2008 was the final blow that turned many of us against our own system. Suddenly, literally overnight, many of us in our 50’s and 60’s found ourselves bankrupt, homeless, and jobless.

So we should not be surprised at who currently occupies the Oval Office. We are a once-optimistic generation that has finally realized the system has utterly failed us.

Moving forward from this spot will not be easy. In fact, it is too late for us baby boomers, but we should stand as an example of the human cost of a political, economic, and social system that values wealth, ideology, and crass political gain over people.

From this point forward, each and every policy initiative, regulation, and law should be evaluated for how it affects all of the people, not just some of the people. The great mistake of globalization was to provide net economic benefit by creating winners and losers. The losers were forgotten, lost in the self-congratulation for what globalization was doing for the economy as a whole.

Never again should any policy be pursued whose side effect is to destroy the livelihoods of large numbers of people without robust programs to mitigate the damage.

We must reduce the power of the financial industry and fight its de-regulation. A robust banking system is always needed, but the financial industry has grown to be an out-sized portion of the economy largely by adding activities that have nothing to do with traditional banking. Economists struggle to identify the benefit  these activities have to the rest of us. Making money by rubbing two dollar bills together is not a productive enterprise. It produces nothing, extracts nothing, ships nothing, performs no meaningful service.

We must not tolerate exploitation of people by any organization, including employers, lenders, or our own government. This means higher minimum wages, more not less regulation of finance, and politicians who are accountable to their constituents, not lobbyists.

And we need to look into the mirror when bemoaning the effects of globalization and exploitation. Many of us happily shop at retailers like Walmart, whose business model is one of driving prices of everything down to rock bottom, including the wages and benefits paid to their own employees. The effect has been to turn China into an economic super-power, an environmental disaster, and a major contributor to global warming while destroying American jobs and expanding the American underclass.

The 2016 election happened because forgotten people finally found a voice. Each of us needs to search our souls for how we failed to understand the angst of so many and how each of us contributed to it.