Forwarding the Conversation

Republican Congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, gives a powerful speech on the recent unemployment numbers and what they mean to our society. As you listen to him think about the following questions:

• What can each of us do to release our own entrepreneurial spirit in these troubled times?
• What must we demand of our government as unemployment rises and economic news worsens?
• Who do we want to be at the other end of this economic downturns?

The Bobby Kennedy Quote in the Speech:

“Even as the drive toward bigness [and] concentration . . . has reached heights never before dreamt of in the past, we have come suddenly to realize how heavy a price we have paid . . . in loss of the values of nature and community and local diversity that found their nurture in the smaller towns and rural areas of America. And we can see, as we enter the last third of the twentieth century, that the price has been too high. Bigness, loss of community, organizations and society grown far past the human scale-these are the besetting sins of the twentieth century, which threaten to paralyze our very capacity to act, or our ability to preserve the traditions and values of our past in a time of swirling, constant change. . . . 
 

Therefore, the time has come . . . when we must actively fight bigness and over concentration, and seek instead to bring the engines of government, of technology, of the economy, fully under the control of our citizens, to recapture and reinforce the values of a more human time and place . . . 
 

It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to . . . the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility . . . and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children’s future . . . if this country is to move ahead

. . . it will not be by making everything bigger, not by piling all our people further on top of one another in huge cities, not by reducing the citizen to the role of passive consumer and recipient of the official vision, the official product.”