Perseverating on Meaning, Purpose, and the Greater Good

I arrived home to a spectacular early ski season and exciting retreats planned and final plans for Magical Year Retreats here in Aspen, Costa Rica and the Caribbean. That said, I am still in shock after completing the final 5000-miles of my decade-long circumnavigation of the United States, a period during which my life focused on weighty topics like post-9/11 America, democracy, capitalism, healthcare, the impact of technology on society, and social safety nets. At parties I'm considered "an interesting guy" or given a wide berth.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian. In 1831, Tocqueville obtained from the July Monarchy a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and proceeded there with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. While he did visit some prisons, Tocqueville traveled widely in the United States and took extensive notes on his observations and reflections.

He returned within nine months and published a report, but the more well-known result of his tour was Democracy in America, which appeared in two volumes, 1835 and 1840, In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies.

Philip Alston was the UN Special Rapporteur from 2014 to 2020 and spent two weeks in the United States in 2017. When I read his report it was obvious we'd been driving the same car, talking to the same people, and making the same confusing and horrifying observations about some areas of the richest country on the planet. His report remains pertinent and I recommend anyone who cares about the state of the country and their neighbors to give it a read.

Perimeter, An Odyssey. As a former journalist, editor and publisher, for a decade I chipped away at an examination of the post-9/11 era in America that included: over twenty thousand miles of travel; three laps of the Pacific Coast Highway from the Mexican border to Canada; six months embedded in Seattle; six months in New Orleans and the South; two months in Sturgis and the Great Plains; a month along the southern border; two months along the Rocky Mountains during the pandemic from Aspen to Glacier and back; months in a half dozen other cities, and finally, the recent five thousand miles from here to Bar Harbor and south. In total thousands of what I describe as conversations with the people I met and subject matter experts I sought out or ran into professionally or recreationally.

Drinking from a fire hose does not even begin. My plan had been to continue my travels in other countries - Baron's France, Baron's Spain, as De Tocqueville did. This morning, I plan to do that under very different auspices.

I can say we live in a stunning, beautiful, diverse, and rich country, and that I routinely meet warm, kind and actually very interesting people. It is rare that I can argue with anyone's logic. They get to their belief's via their lived experience. I can barely walk a block without tripping over opportunity. We've developed technology that would have been considered magic 100 years ago, affluence unparalleled in human history, an unheard of ease and comfort I argue is bad for us, and endless choices for our favorite ketchup, jeans and sexual partner.

I can also only nod in agreement with James Baldwin, "people believe things about America that just aren't true."

I have not been able to shake the incongruity of what I just described - which doesn't scratch the surface of our amazing accomplishments - with the loss of our middle class, a division I said in 2015 I could only compare to the Civil War that is now hard wired into our national psyche, a fraying social fabric, the loss of many historic institutions, a distrust of knowledge and science, a polarization of wealth not seen since the gilded age, a surveillance state that can only be described as Orwellian, a broken and opaque healthcare and insurance system that routinely harms patients and that Gore Vidal and others eviscerated 40 years ago, a cohort of metrics going in the wrong direction, and a crassness and lack of civility that our leaders model rather than condemn.

All that is of limited interest to me this morning. I met far too many people left behind, far too many who have no chance at the American Dream, far to many who had no way to grasp the first rung on the ladder, and far too many who simply due to a bad hand or misfortune will never recover. There is nothing for them.

More in Common Ventures, while not a panacea for the country's more complex and intransigent challenges, is my answer for something there is no reason or excuse for in this country. I've been working on it for almost three years, there is still a tremendous amount of work to complete, and if successful it will via cash distributions many people here take for granted, transform recipient's lives.

I envision our pilot cities being communities with populations under 10,000, our recipients being introduced by a variety of faith-based leaders, health and mental healthcare professionals, non-profits and governmental organizations.

There's still a lot of digital details being edited so if you want to introduce me to someone in your community you can email me at [email protected]

https://christopherpatrickbaron.com/more-in-common-ventures/