From the Andy Kessler blog of 20 July 2009 with my choice of extracts and highlights…

The 70s were a smog-filled haze. Upward mobility was a pipedream. Stock markets stagnated and all the moon-walking Space Age dreams of the 60s were shattered with layoffs and plant closings and Rust Belts and urban unrest.

You were told to do well in school and maybe you could get an entry level job at a big company and wear a white short-sleeved shirt and work your way up over twenty or so years, so you could buy that little house in the suburbs and squeeze out 2.3 kids and afford a station wagon and … well, that’s the way it is.

Someone else has all the money and you don’t.

That’s the way it is.

Unknown forces control your life.

That’s the way it is.

Governments are corrupt.

That’s the way it is.

Society is divided into classes, and you’re stuck in yours.

That’s the way it is.

Instead, what it took was a few little microchips (Ted Hoff at Intel), and a couple of funky pieces of code (Bill Gates at Microsoft) and a few smart people (Steve Jobs at Apple and Larry Ellison at Oracle and thousands of others), who weren’t content working for The Man. Each of them dislodged "the way it is" and got a few people asking "why is it this way?" and declaring "think different" and "eat my dust," and

bang,

the status quo crumbled.

 

You could create your own future. Power shifted out of the hands of conglomerates like Gulf & Western and Engulf and Devour and away from centralized bureaucrats running faceless government operations. Instead, power ended up in your hands, my hands, all of our hands. To do what we wanted.

To change the world, for the better, increase the size of the pie, bring the rest of the world onto our wealth grid. And not by building huts in Costa Rica but by taking down those obstructing progress, those leeching off the rest of us, holding us back, milking the present for their own benefit rather than standing aside and letting wealth-creating innovation increase everyone’s living standard.

Those "that’s the way it is" types needed to move over.

But they didn’t move on their own, so we either had to wait for them to die or just destroy them. Seek and Destroy. Music companies. Travel agents. Insurance brokers. And we’re not done–the hard work has just started.

It took me a long time, well into my life, to get Cronkite’s words out of my head and realize that not only is anything possible (thank you Kevin Garnett), but that I was the one that had to make it happen. There were no gifts, no trailblazers to follow.

We all have to invent the future

by destroying the past.

Sadly, the old mentality is back.

Citibank is too big to fail.

That’s the way it is.

The government needs to bail out the automakers.

That’s the way it is.

Taxes are going up.

That’s the way it is.

Carbon dioxide will boil the oceans so we need to live in cities and walk to work.

That’s the way it is.

Elites like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and Al Gore will tell you what you’ll be paid, how much health care you’ll get, how much risk you can take, what kind of car you can drive, how much water you can use to flush your toilet, because …

That’s The Way It Is.

 

It does NOT have to be that way.

 

Inspire people to dream,

and to realize their dreams.