I have always liked images of sailboats, and I have always liked the idea that when you give, giving comes back around to you. I have never understood people who want to wall themselves off in a compound and destroy the rest of the world.

Around 2010, Rachel Maddow went overseas to tour a war-torn country. Most of the landscape was dirt, shacks, children playing and garbage blowing around. But in one spot, there was a walled compound. You could see nice buildings and landscaping over the wall and hear generators powering everything.  

It seems illogical that someone seeing this scene would say “hey, we want some of that in this country” but that is what we are facing. I have no illusion that the people with money want to live together with us; they want to kill off everyone they don’t need to wait on them.

And I understand that the way to fight this is to put our numbers together against their institutional force: the many against the money. This has happened before, and the many have beaten the money back, but we have always left the mechanisms in place that caused the problem in the first place.

This time we have a clearer understanding of systemic effects and the sentiment behind the systems our country was built on. These have to change. We need to incentivize building communities, not personal fortunes. We need to incentivize companies benefitting their communities, not their shareholders. We need to break and rebuild how financing is done, here and around the world. And we need to join with other countries to enforce these standards so that bad actors have no haven to run to.

It all comes back to trust, to standing together and backing each other up. They know trust is fragile, so they attack it constantly. However, they cannot refute the core principle that we can do more together than we can individually. A rising tide lifts all boats. So get your boat in the water.