The Correction: Guest MINDSETTER™ Mattie Smith
The Correction: Guest MINDSETTER™ Mattie Smith
Two parties, and their corporate familiars, fight to maintain it. Occasionally they pick up cultural issues like baubles and set them down when they find strings attached. Or they cut the strings.
You have seen this in your timelines as corporations desperately try not to be "the racist" friend by posting in solidarity. Amazon, having no plans to change its warehouse labor practices, trying to position itself as a leader for racial rights.
Your friends told you that there were people who wanted to genuinely change this, but you doubted. It seemed an impossibility. Despite the climate.
Despite the job loss. Despite the death. All horsemen.
And then the fourth appeared: destruction.
The parties, who plumbed information networks into our pockets, both blame the destruction on each other’s boogiemen. But we are all desperate. So
the destruction and the destructors look like all of us. Fresh rubble, a sacrament to the state of our hearts.
Our elected servants have starved us of genuine investment, armed us to the teeth, and do their own correction cooing as the worst outcomes happen in communities that have always been the most vulnerable.
No, the nation is due for the correction. The correction must slay the market god and replace it with the gods of the neighborhood, the family, and the worker. It must grieve the disproportionality of its neglect.
And this correction? If it is true, it understands that the New Deal still led us to these horsemen. As did Joe Biden of yore, and Mr. Trump. If it is true it will look like our governors protecting us from the despot who invests in killing us instead of healing us.
If it is true it will look like massive government spending to stabilize and nurture American lives, without exception or bias. Everyone must be included this time. No red lines.
And if the correction is false, the gravity of our fear may pull us further into militarization. It already appears we are heading this way, as journalists are shot and we spend our unemployment checks bailing each other out of jail for exercising the first amendment.
Let the Correction be true. Pray, read, communicate, disrupt. Deny anyone who says you are asking for too much. Demand more for all of us, including those you will never meet and those you find undeserving.
The time is heavy. Resolve yourself to an act of courage louder to be sure not to leave any doubt. Be genuinely brave.
Mattie Smith is a lifelong resident of Providence and alum of both La Salle Academy and the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College.