Faith in the Future

Current economic climate has had a profound impact on people's outlook on life. I find people who used to be cheery, hopeful, excited about the future have become cynical, suspicious and angry. I am an avid listener of "Washington Journal" program on C-SPAN. This is a program where people call in to speak their mind about current hop topics like Health Care, War, Climate, Education etc. There is a palpable shift in the mood of the callers from what it used to be couple of years back. Rationality has given way to partisanship. Cyncisim about governement seems at all time high. Instead of being hopeful about future, more and more people are succumbing to a victims mentality where they are looking to lay the blame for their current state of affairs on somebody else like Wall Street, Politicians, Globalization, Immigrants etc.. How did we reach here and what is the remedy for it?

David Brooks address this topic beautifully in his column in NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17brooks.html?_r=1

I can think of one group of people who has remained untouched from all this gloom and doom. They are the entrepreneurs. They are eternal optimist. Odds of survival of a startup are less than those who landed in the beaches of Normandy and that was 1 in 500. Even with such high odds, every day new companies are started, innovation boundaries pushed further, capital raised, people hired. This is the real stimulus. Instead of spending stimulus money in artificially creating jobs (cash for clunkers is a classic example), we should make long term investments in things like basic R&D, education, health care with proven ROI over the long term.

People will again begin to have faith in the future if they see their political, community and business leaders take on tough problems, make hard decisions and think long term.