The House "We" Built

I fly a lot.  Really, quite a lot. Every few weeks I board a plane and travel from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast, either for business or family duties. I work professionally between Montreal, New York, Los Angeles and various locations in India. I have family in Boston,  two sisters and a brother in California and extended family in Buffalo, New York. My two best friends live in San Diego and Denver.  I've worked on many, if not most, of the Academy Award winning animated films over the last 25 years, and am currently managing a global visual effects firm. I'm responsible for delivering stories to the world, using technology unimaginable 40 years ago. My industry can convince audiences of just about anything through picture and audio magic.  Most of the time it's cool, fun and inspiring. Sometimes it's concerning in the extreme.

Chicago 35,000 Feet

Around 3 years ago, during one of my coast to coast flights, I was studying the outline of Chicago, as we circled slowly over 20 minutes, descending carefully to land at Midway during a very windy day. Contemplating my duty to improve the world in some way, I began to think about life on our beautiful planet, in the USA, and eventually began to think deeply about the underlying structure of our economy and the resultant concentration of wealth and poverty that has arisen, as a result of the forces of business, global commerce, education and social mobility, or lack thereof.

I reflected on the general public's inability to see this system clearly as it is constructed and operates. Most people functioning within it, living as consumers, struggling to manage their income and debt, do not have the time or resources to spend figuring out why things are the way they are, or how to change them.  This was my own story until I decided to go into debt, and get an M.B.A. in 2010.

Chiacgo 20,000 Feet

The truth is that most people do not have access to, or ways to understand, the economic and market mechanisms that shape their daily lives. Consumers have controlled and limited choices and therefore controlled and limited incomes. I began to think about how and where our market system is hidden, how and where it operates in plain sight, without apology, explanation or remedy for the harm it creates. I began to think deeply about phrases like, "the hidden hand of the market" and the "global elite". Also about the use of the word, "market" at all, as if it were a separate entity from the human beings making business and personal choices every day. I thought about corporations having legal rights as people, which they do. I reflected on "solving for profit" and margins.  I began to contemplate even deeper, opaque financial system realities like algorithmic trading, tariffs, subsidies, shorting commodities futures, capital markets, artificial intelligence, the value of money, and foreign trades balances.

I thought about policy, public and private education, personal finance and how, for most kids in the US, especially girls, managing money is not a taught skill, until well into adult life, when people who might have been able to enroll in higher education find they cannot pay off a student loan or make a credit card payment. For people of color, women, marginalized populations, those at risk, veterans, the elderly, victims of civic, criminal violence or domestic violence, trauma, war or systemic racial bias, most of these concepts have even less relationship to the day to day personal struggle to survive.

Chicago 10,000 Feet

As we descended to land, I watched neighborhoods change from concentrated downtown skyscrapers, to homes with swimming pools, industrial neighborhoods with low income housing, that looked blighted - tract homes - obvious food desserts, visible from the air at that lower altitude.  I thought about the people living and working across all those places separated by business structures that are a mere 4 minutes apart at 500 miles per hour.

Finally these thoughts led me to a new set of reflections, which refused to be pushed aside.  

"If I were to suddenly be dropped out of this plane, with its pressurized cabin and video monitor that keeps me entertained and distracted, into any one of these environments, from the most comfortable to the least, how is that any different from a soul's journey on Earth? If I were to jump out of this plane right now, at this instant, over one of these spots on Earth outside of Chicago, USA, how is that different from being born into a system that I cannot see or understand? If I landed in a posh upscale neighborhood, educated, caring, two parent, two income household, I would grow up with a certain set of ideas and expectations of privilege probably white. If I landed in a food dessert, unable to go to the library, read about the world, did not see my race and culture reflected back to me as safe and honorable - how is that fair? How is that right?  How is it ethical that the accident of birth is the precursor for all that follows in a life, here in the United States in 2017?

How is it that we have paved over a planet that could easily sustain all the human beings on it, created and maintain a system that divides people into those who are worthy and those who are not, generated wealth for a small group of people by using large labor pools kept in ignorance, concentrated available capital, eliminated an entire middle class, hypnotized adults and children across all walks of life with small, 24-hour hand-held mobiles devices, generating data that is collected for even more wealth concentration, more commerce, product monetization and individual disempowerment?

WTF is even going on down there?"

The reality of something I have known intuitively for some years sunk in.

The next thoughts that came drained the breath from me and my blood ran cold, horrified at my ignorance and passivity.

"What have we done?"
​"We = White"
"Whose house am I living in?"
"Whose interests am I serving?"

Chicago Landed

I'm white, 58, with an MBA in finance.  I grew up as the daughter of a Republican father who worked for Governors Brown, Reagan and Brown in Sacramento California.  I have a Democratic mother, who pushed me in my baby stroller over the Golden Gate Bridge when Dr. Martin Luther King marched across it in 1963.  I was 2 years old. My mother also led the Sacramento Chapter of The League of Women Voters in 1967 and 1968, a tumultuous time.  My father worked for the kind of Republicans who initiated the Environmental Protection Act for California, protected water rights for the Central Valley and established the Veteran's Care Act.  My parents, members of different parties, agreed on politics. They were humane. They fought for the poor, sought to overturn injustice, were mavericks in their day. Dad was Executive Director of the Intergovernmental Board of Electronic Data Processing for the State of California, announcing prophetically in 1969, "There will be no privacy in the future".  He retired and left industry after two massive heart attacks and spent his last years in the foothills of California in a meditation group.  Mom was complicated, opinionated, passionate, a homemaker, who later worked for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund before moving to LA to run an inner city preschool for 20 years before eventually retiring.

That flight changed my life. 

The long wide spiraling circles over a large section of Chicago made by the jet, as it slowly descended - aligning for a safe window to land, allowed me time to see the world come more and more into focus, and along with it, the realization of the part I am playing in the current system.

For the last 3 years the knowledge that I had to change direction has been on my heart, a persistent, at times inconvenient, pressure on my conscience. It has taken time to make the decision to come out as a force for change.  Growing up the youngest of 4  smart and intense siblings created in me a deep desire not to rock the boat, to remain invisible in order to stay safe and out of the way. The belief that I could observe from the sidelines, make small contributions without upsetting anyone or drawing attention to myself  has dominated my life. 

Now, events around the world, my own move to Canada and back, ethics and the current psychological crises I see gripping the world, especially young people, those I admire and learn from, have forced this craving for my own personal anonymity and safety into the background.  

My next set of blog posts aims to describe and explain in detail the economic system within which we live here in the United States and by extension, the world.  My goal is to support the argument for a re-making of the current economy away from the an exploitative model to a rational and healthy alternative for human beings, animals, the planet and its plant life and natural well-being.

As a futurist and global media maker, it's time to step up and embrace a re-making of the global economy, one that has wedged itself, and by extension the world, into a corner that leads to literally nowhere for too many, crushing opportunity and draining the planet of species, diversity and vitality.

I hope you come along as we look at how the global economic system works, explore and unpack rational alternatives, ranging from food production, food consumption, energy and oil, to financial market behaviors, individual savings and investments to personal attention, time and identity harvesting by phones and devices. 

It's way past time to talk about what "we" are doing here.

In peace, Julie
Boston, Massachusetts
2020