"The Age of Ambition"

From the New York Times, "The Age of Ambition," in an article by Nicholas D. Kristof:

'Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs "The Power of Unreasonable People."'

The article goes on to talk about examples of social entrepreneurs, young go-getters who founded non-profits devoted to saving people who can't afford reading glasses and taking orphaned Thai children off the streets and onto the path to success.

This has everything to do with my previous post, about the blessings and dangers of young idealism in the absence of moral farsightedness.

Nothing can be more exciting than living in an age of ambition, and to be honest, nothing can be more frightening.

It is the age of social entrepreneurship, newly-grads heading out there to shake things up and re-vamp a clearly incoherent system. How many of them want shiny new teeth, and how many of them want shiny new teeth AND actual solutions?

Harper writes: "There is something wrong with a Welfare State. We've tried it and it doesn't work all that well, espceially for the people who are the hungriest with the achiest teeth."

This brings up an important point. It's an abrasive reality that what our welfare state consists of is the presence of semi-accessible dental care and the complete absence of the most critical criteria for a welfare system: environmental mindfulness, socioeconomic egalitarianism and justice. What we have is a tincture welfare state, in which "pretty good" is good enough, and those who are appointed to judge its goodness are those that tend to benefit from it the most.

The aim of the Fishing Group can be found in the above quote, "To revolutionize the fishing industry," with this small addition: "in a way that works."

Talk about ambition.