Union(s)...the State of...

   That word "union" has a far different connotation that the similar word of "unity."  And what struck me in reading the INC. 5000 issue which asked 5000 CEOs of mostly unknown but rapidly growing companies such as its #1 listing of Freestar which grew an astounding 36,680% in a single year) what current world issues concerned them; the two issues among their lowest concerns were gun control and healthcare.  Wait, really?   Here were issues that I thought were on the minds of most people, or at least many of the people I know, and yet it barely registered among the majority of these primarily-young CEOs.*  The top concerns, as with many of my friends as well, was the economy and taxes.   This was not good news to me because it seemed to show that even after so many calamities of random public shootings, sexual abuses by those in "ppwer," human rights violations, bankruptcies due to lack of healthcare, weather disasters, and corrupt politicians, well after all of that, the end result was that for half of our country it was no big deal.  This appeared to be the consensus when the news program 60 Minutes gathered what they thought were an evenly divided segment of people, and from two widely different political districts, and asked them about the recent Congressional investigation into whether President Trump and members of his team purposely withheld military funding from Ukraine unless they provided some investigative "dirt" on one of Trump's opponents (if so, this would be against Constitutional law say many so-versed attorneys, but even this is coming up for debate**).  The consensus was an even split with 50% of the people being interviewed finding Trump's actions to be no problem and within his rights, and 50% outraged at a President testing the limits of what can and cannot be done.  Another future issue likely to come up if this impeachment goes through would be that of a President pardoning himself (currently a President has the power to pardon anyone he or she so chooses from any federal crime such as murder, embezzlement, fraud or whatever).  Ah politics...can't live with it, can't live without it (or can we?).

    But despite this sounding a bit editorial, I'm not planning on heading there.  Our state has an overflow of new cats, an overpopulation of both kittens and adult cats which has been forced to become feral as owners move and/or let them roam free outdoors and for the most part, shrug their shoulders on the thought of having them spayed or neutered (we won't even go into the generally dark and dank world of underground breeders).  Our no-kill shelters (now nearing 90% in our state) are straining to keep their pledge but the inflow of cats is testing their abilities.  And the reaction from the public seems to be...meh.  No big deal?  Okay, what about this one -- a report a few days ago from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) said that three Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) increased to a record high last year (the fifth year in a row): syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia.  Congenital syphilis jumped 40%.  Wait, syphilis?  The same syphilis sex thing that plagued gangster Al Capone?  Didn't that disease fade away some decades ago, sort of like polio and measles?  Said a piece in The Atlantic: “There’s a lack of public, provider, and policy-maker knowledge about what’s happening in STDs, and many consider these to be infections of a bygone era,” Matthew Prior, the communications director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, told me via email.  “Like, who gets syphilis anymore?”  Last year, 486 school buses’ worth of people did.  Ahem, us "value-oriented" and wizened seniors are guilty of adding to those numbers, said HealthVersed.

    So what's happening?  As we getting so blasé about what's going on outside our comfortable bubbles that we're becoming the frogs in boiling water?***  Do these words from Raphael Cushnir sound familiar: We humans, it seems, have manufactured a way of life completely out of sync with our evolution as a species.  Our bodies can't handle what our minds have wrought.  Many of us have the chronic illnesses to prove it.  And now, with the Western economic collapse and the shrinking middle class, the crisis has grown significantly worse.  Most of us are forced to work far longer for much less.  Our standard of living is a far cry from that of our parents.  We have almost no opportunity to relax, play, or just be.  Plus, the rise of cell phones and similar devices makes it incredibly addictive to live in the land of elsewhere rather than in our immediate surroundings.  To remedy this, we head to retreat centers, yoga classes and meditation groups.  But as soon as those experiences end, we head back to our hyper-speed lives.  Ironically, our time-outs help us better tolerate what we don't want and can't sustain.  We've become like those slowly boiling frogs, of legend, who keep acclimating to the rising temperature of the water instead of just jumping out.  While some among us keep hollering about how hot it's getting, the majority of us in the developed world show no signs of the rebellious fervor suddenly so prevalent in the Middle East.  And Hong Kong, I might add.  And those words?  Cushing wrote the piece for Psychology Today back in 2011.

    It's rare for me to read a magazine cover-to-cover, but the issue mentioned at the start of this post was so full of hopeful stories, those of people ignoring the signs of malaise and moving on individually, or acting independently against the stories and polls and words of "you'll never make it."  And despite their businesses falling all over the economic spectrum, underneath it all were human stories of struggles or life-changing moments, each coupled with dreams filled with determination.   There was Josh Levin: My mom got pregnant with me when she was 16.  I had multiple stepdads.  They treated her poorly.  She did the best she could, but she had to make decisions based on survival.  The question wasn't "Is this a caring, loving person?" but "Does he have a house, so we don't end up in a homeless shelter?"  Once, we ate pork rinds for a week because we couldn't afford groceries.  Another time, we fished in the pond out back to catch and eat the bluegills there -- after our water got shut off.  I never felt safe or secure.  No matter how well I did at school or in sports --and I made the varsity wrestling team-- I still saw myself as the poor, dirty kid.  To this day, that mentality is hard to change.  Josh Levin went on to enter a field he was terrible at...being an electrician (I sucked.  Bad.  My first day, it took me two hours to put in three plugs.)  Last year his company grew nearly 2000% and took in $3.6 million.  Or take Ashley Harris who discovered that probiotics cleared up her digestive problems and eczema, as well as improved her moods, so she began experimenting with making her own, ignoring the advice of those with MBAs (If they knew exactly how to do it, they'd be doing it.  We're learning as we go, and trusting our gut has been the best lesson so far.).  Her company grew 2623% last year and took in $3.1 million.  Or Lauren Brill who was diagnosed with Stage 1 Hodgkin lymphoma but still had a sweet tooth.  How to combine something nutritious with something that tastes, well, like a good cookie?  (All my friends were headed off to jobs, and I was at home starting chemo.)  She took her $15,000 in savings and spent a year both studying nutrition and experimenting with different ingredients for her cookie dough.  Her company grew 3026% last year and took in $6.4 million.  Said Brill, "At the end of the day, everyone loves cookies."

   Or there's the story behind Richelieu Dennis who, at age 10, witnessed the violence rocking his native country of Liberia. (I grew up seeing how cruel humans could be to one another.  I think that shaped a lot of my sense of fairness.)  When asked if that was what caused him to leave (the violence would last 20 years), he replied: It really wasn't "I've gotta get the hell out of here" as much as "What is causing all of this?"  And what role can I play, and what can I do?  For 24 years he never took a penny from outside sources.  And two years ago, he sold the company to Unilever for $850 million.  But it doesn't end there; he wouldn't sell without a few terms: they had to put $100 million into a New Voices fund to help businesses owned by entrepreneurial black women (currently, he says, just 7% or each investment dollar in today's world heads in that direction something he is trying to change) and he had to remain CEO with no strings attached...the deal took 5 years to complete but it did happen (he also continues to support the Todee Mission in Liberia).  

    An earlier interview with Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, carried the same vision: When I finished school, my dad asked me, "What do you want to do with your life?"  I didn't really know.  So he asked, "Well, what's the biggest problem facing the world?"  I said the climate.  If we don't get climate right, nothing else matters.  So I got into energy, because that was the traditional way to attack that problem.  I did that for years, and loved it.  My family had a farm, so I was familiar with agriculture.  But when I started to look at the role that livestock played in climate, I was dumbfounded to find it was bigger than energy's.  At these big conferences, MBAs and engineers would go on and on about fuel cells, and then go out and have a steak.  Cows, chickens, and pigs consume tremendous amounts of vegetation and drink a ton of water, and then use their biological systems to build muscle that we harvest as meat.  Any basic business course tells you to identify and get rid of bottlenecks in your production.  In meat, the animal is the bottleneck.  Meat is pretty simple: It's amino acids, lipids, trace minerals, a really small amount of vitamins, and water.  Animals take those things and build this beautiful structure we call meat.  You can't tell me today that we don't have the ability to do that directly.  I haven't seen any other opportunity whereby focusing on one thing --building meat directly from plants-- you could powerfully impact four major problem areas: climate, natural resources, human health, and animal welfare.  Here was a chance to change the world.  

Protesting for democracy in Hong Kong...Photo: The Indianwire

    Change the world?  Band together and go on strike or march in protest?  What was so similar in all of these polls and stories is that even with all the tales of partisanship and divides, there is something uniting many of us and that is a desire to fill a need.  For some it might be to make money, but for many it might be as simple as making another's life easier, even if that role might mean sacrificing your own time and efforts to help another person or animal.  Said James Ledbetter, the editor of Inc.: ...in case you need a reminder, most of life --and starting a business in particular-- is not like a video game...there is no cheat code for business growth, no single path to success...it's not a degree or a bank account or a set of lessons that everyone learns.  Further into the magazine an article asked: What's Stopping You From Starting A Business?  And in writing about another non-meat related venture, they wrote about another Brown, this one about as far away from a farm as possible but versed in pediatrics, then genetics, then scientific research which led him to eventually isolate the heme protein; Pat Brown went on to create Impossible Foods (a competitor to Beyond Meat and now valued at $2 billion).  Said the article: To say Pat Brown is unconventional is to say that cows moo.  But it's important to celebrate him, because, though few of us are as smart, many of us are possessed of the same inspiration.  We just lack the conviction that we're the entrepreneurial type.  Yet many of the best founders don't have an MBA -- what they have is a sense of opportunity, a hunch that they're on to something that the rest of the world hasn't quite spotted.  Added Brown himself: There's a big phenomenon of people self-censoring, worrying about the impostor syndrome.  They say, "Someone has to do this, but I'm not the guy," or "I'm not qualified."  People limit their own opportunities...there's no roadmap for what we're doing, but someone has to solve the problem.  Someone indeed, even if it's only a tiny bit at a time and something that perhaps makes only an ever-so small difference...who knows who that person is or where that person lives, or what that person is doing or what that person is reading.  But underneath it all you have to ask, might that person be you?
  

*In a bit of irony, a company called Tomahawk Strategic Solutions, formed by two former Navy SEAL Team 6 members, saw growth of over 1100% last year, much to the chagrin of their founders.  Their specialty is training companies and even cities on how to respond to an active shooter entering their premises, or in the case of cities, a shopping mall or a school.

**Said a piece in from the fact check page of the American Bar Association (a page worth visiting if only to keep one current on one take of things): The Logan Act, for instance, bars any U.S. citizen from interacting with a foreign government to influence policy.  But many experts believe this law is overly broad, and there have been no successful prosecutions in its near 220 years.  The page also noted: Since the first impeachment proceeding in 1797, the U.S. House of Representatives has initiated impeachment proceedings more than 60 times against top U.S. civil officials, including against three U.S. presidents — Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1998.  President Donald Trump is the fourth.  Under the U.S. Constitution, the House has the “sole power” to begin an impeachment inquiry, and the Senate alone has the power to try an impeachment case referred by the House. 

***That boiling frog thing...it was all a story, a fable, but a persistent one said Wikipedia.  Frogs will jump out of a pan when the water gets too warm, long before it gets hot.  And before I add too many asterisks, the final thoughts on Beyond Meat -- another fast food vendor has decided to feature their burgers: McDonald's.  And finally, for those of you who have actually read all the way through to this ending, check out Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's take on what composes "a more perfect union."