Maximizing Our Human Potential

I’m back after taking an incredibly long break to move across the country as well as work on another project dear to my heart, my first novel, An Invisible Woman in Afghanistan which I am about to publish. (More on this soon!) I’m living near the New England seacoast, a place I lived many, many years ago and am very fond of.

I’ve missed this blog. It’s great to be writing again, trying to fit the pieces together and maybe even getting a glimpse of the larger puzzle. But this particular blog entry has also proven far more challenging to write and think about than any other I’ve done, maybe because it’s so close to home for so many of us. 

There have been a lot of people falling by the wayside in the world of work lately. Many “old” jobs are disappearing here in the U.S. and in Europe, war and natural disasters are taking their economic toll globally, and despite all our fancy new gadgets, we still have huge numbers of both unemployed and underemployed people across the planet.

And yet there are jobs. And there is a ton of work to do.

We need doctors and other healthcare professionals like never before. We desperately need every possible variety of engineer. We need teachers, professors, and other educators. We even need more lawyers in some places to represent the poor and disenfranchised.

However, there is an insidious underlying assumption among all this need, and that is that we should only have so many of certain types of worker. So many doctors, engineers, etc…

This is wrong. And with so much need, why do we cling to this outmoded belief? I’m not sure and I’m also not sure I want to look too closely at the “why’s” of this situation.

But I do know we can fix it. We just need to change our minds. That’s the tough part but we can do it. A lot of people thought we couldn’t go to the Moon and yet, there’s proof positive at the top of this page that that belief was unfounded.

If we’re going to do this, though, we need to provide more and smarter support for our work force, top to bottom. If a kid in inner-city Baltimore wants to be a doctor, then we should be giving him every bit of help that we can. And if a Nepalese girl wants to be a structural engineer, then it would be very smart of her government to support her however they can. Or a Honduran day laborer wants to be a lawyer in his country, that country would do well to support his dreams.

For whatever reason, the military often seems to be on the cutting edge of trying new things.  In the U.S, we have a huge number of veterans returning home, many without much prospect of a solid job once they leave the service. Many of these people have ended up on the streets of our towns and cities over the last few decades battling terrible mental and physical illness, as well as enduring the cruel scorn, disgust, and neglect of a civilian population that should know better.  The U.S. Veterans Administration, although incredibly efficient in some ways, has in many others, fallen down.

So the vets decided to fix it themselves.

One such organization among many large and small, publicly funded and private, is the Wounded Warrior Project. Among the services they provide are extensive resources and even financial aid to help veterans who want to further their education do so.

As a country and as a world, we need to be doing far more to train and educate our population, and that means everyone, most especially the ones we might be prejudiced to believe are “irredeemable.” There is absolutely no reason why we can’t do this. We went to the moon, right?

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC