RichardRoll.com

A Day of Patriots

September 10, 2009 on 5:00 pm | In America's Future, Baby Boomer Advice, Get Motivated |

What an unusual day I had yesterday.  Starting at 7am, with three other members of our Baby Boomers Retirement Network team in tow, I headed to a large Hartford, CT venue to hear from an all-star cast of luminaries on the theme of Get Motivated!  We along with 19,000 others in the audience, heard Joe Montana, Laura Bush, Krish Dhanam, Phil Town, Zig Ziglar, Steve Forbes, Rudy Giuliani, and Colin Powell tell their personal stories, funny anecdotes, and reminiscences in the process of trying to make pertinent points.  I came away with a number of standout ideas, mostly not new but always worth being reminded of.

America is a country with many problems, flawed but still a great country, still with the greatest potential of any country on earth because of our system of free enterprise and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms [which need to be protected vigilantly and vigorously from every type of extremism].  There are no lines of people waiting to get into most, if not all, other countries of the world.  Our freedoms and protections here beat most anywhere else. Free enterprise is still the greatest engine for prosperity the world has seen.  Our level of educational success as a nation is way below par (Laura Bush), we have to make the future of our children and their children a higher priority.  We need to all make sure we have God and service to God in our mission.

Zig talked about Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement to expand dignity to all individuals, and having a sound “Home Court Advantage” (be good to your spouse) to have the most success and joy in life.  Forbes talked about how the Fed’s excess printing of money in 2003-4, when we should have been protecting the dollar, was the underlying cause of the financial crisis [partially true but not clearly the cause].  He’s still beating the same drum: simplify the tax code, enact a flat tax (I haven’t heard the other side of that argument however, if there is one).  Colin Powell and Giuliani, polished, professional, predictable. Two great patriots, in my opinion (although I’m not a huge Giuliani fan).  Krish Dhanam, an Indian émigré, motivational speaker and protégé of Zig Ziglar, who now lives in Texas, reeled off portions of speeches from Patrick Hale, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy, Ghandi, and Mother Theresa to bring home his message of patriotism and self-management: take ownership of our lives, practice stewardship–give more than you have, leave more than you take, build great partnerships, realize whose applause matters.  Beware: mediocrity and misery both love company, keep out of that trap.

Others talked about how we have to wean ourselves off of junk media (TV, tabloid rags, news media), junk pop culture, and junk food, and focus on getting our family’s financial foundations and values straightened out and sound (a message I’ve been pounding away at in this blog and elsewhere, for years).  The government is helpless and hopeless in correcting the housing foreclosure problem at this point (see the my February, 3, 2009 blog post “Emergency Plan to Save the Economy” for my housing market recovery proposal which the key officials in Washington have all received).

Then, yesterday evening, I went to hear the rock group Living Colour perform live at our local Fairfield Theatre Company Stage One, an intimate 200 seat theatre whose Board I serve on.  Living Colour is a Grammy award winning and truly “out there” metal/funk/rock band who studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, toured as an opening act for the Rolling Stones, and are virtuoso musicians.  Yet incredibly, the themes of Living Colour were surprisingly related to those of the luminaries earlier in the day: how New Orleans was forsaken over race after Hurricane Katrina; what it took to overcome the KKK and the “colored not allowed” culture of the Old South; Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Statue of Liberty and American Flag is for all Americans, not just the few.  They quote JFK, FDR, and MLK in their song “Cult of Personality,” which the National Review listed at number 18 on its list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs in 2006.  They shout, “You don’t have to follow me, only you can set you free,” echoing messages of the motivators in Hartford.  Their song “Middleman” exposes the folly of allowing the media to be the middleman between Americans and their experience of life.

And for me, the biggest takeaway of all from the day comes from the lyrics in one of Living Colour’s songs: “You’ve got to fight for your neighborhood.”  And neighborhood in this sense is metaphorical, it’s where you live, it’s where you come from, it’s the best of who you are.  You have to fight for it.  Fight the foreclosure blight, fight the educational slide, fight the narrow-minded mean-spirited (Giuliani: be an optimist, with pessimism there is no “there” that’s worth striving to get to.)

Fight the Taliban, fight the terrorists, fight the bullies and the obstructionists who oppose creating a more just and humane society, and a fiscally sound one.  And note once and for all: It will never be perfect.

Fight to learn about how to get better returns on your investment capital and 401(k) or IRA account without taking more risk (it can be done and I’ll be showing you more specifics in the coming months).  Keep your spirit strong, your body healthy, work to get out of costly debt and get out now from unproductive financial services relationships.

Fight for America’s highest ideals, for most, it’s still the best chance in the world.  And for Boomers: take action, take the right action, take it now and keep taking it.