This is a response to a Facebook Post-turned Oakland News Now blog post on Al Attles III’s view that social media is responsible for social dysfunction.
Maybe the answer to the anguished question posed by Al Attles III is to have him help organize a Bay Area-specific forum that can draw together any number of local luminaries who are willing to carry this discussion about the cause and cure for our regional dysfunctionality to its natural conclusion, as opposed to something like a march to end hunger or homelessness.
Those kinds of efforts are commendable, but it seems like once the march is over, everyone goes home and it’s back to business again with not a lot to show for it in terms of followthrough and hands-on, long-term solutions.
Yes, this is obviously a national – worldwide, actually! – problem, but, uniquely, we here in the Bay Area have the means and the will to wrap our arms around it first right here in “The Strongest Regional Economy on the World” and, if successful, serve as a model for other areas of the country where the burden of fear, hostility, inequity, and every other rotten aspect of our current state of affairs is an all-too-obvious detriment to a stable and flourishing financial system.
How can the Bay Area be the Strongest anything with such a long list of seemingly solutionless problems overflowing into our streets?
Do our revered Bay Area sports stars – even a few of those who might have not performed as well as we wanted in a critical game or two – have the ability to convene such a region-wide forum, and by doing so, ensure that enough powerful leaders, executives, decisionmakers, authorities and others whose opinions matter will attend and agree to help afterward with the implementation steps that must result from such a convention?
Such leaders, executives, etc., are, after all, the very individuals who, taken altogether, are responsible for the status of today’s Bay Area, skillfully guiding us to the point where we can lay claim to that “Strongest in the World” title; and it’d be great, timely and appropriate if they could act in concert to make such a remarkable claim even stronger!
Figuring out some truly basic steps in the direction of an evolved economy, one that doesn’t breed or need homeless populations, uneducated kids with little hope and no future, rampant poverty and so many other failings of our current system shouldn’t be that difficult with the copious resources and intellectual access we have to draw upon – and must utilize soon if we wish to avoid being sucked into the oligarchy that otherwise awaits us…
I can think of no other group of people as respected as our prominent Bay Area Hall of Famers who could draw, coax or commend such a group of decisionmekers into such a summit, especially now as the prospect of a more centrally-managed Bay Area metropolitan region comes increasingly into focus, with a system of more humanistic principles needed to provide smarter, more holistic growth.