Tomorrow Will Be A Brighter Day - 04 Jun 2020
Wow. The following is how author Robert Kurson described the riots that happened in the US:
“After thirty minutes, the police obliged them, smashing and clubbing and kicking and dragging anyone they could reach—demonstrators, onlookers, journalists—and it didn’t matter that the network television cameras were filming or that people were yelling “The whole world is watching!” or that those in the streets weren’t Vietcong or Soviets but the sons and daughters of fellow citizens; all that mattered for the next eighteen minutes of brutality and mayhem was that something had fractured in America and no one had any idea how to stop it, and after order was restored there still seemed to be cries coming from the streets, even though there was no one left to make them.
Among the millions who watched the unedited footage on television, there hardly seemed a soul among them—rich or poor, young or old, left or right—who didn’t wonder if America could be put back together again.”
Could America be put back together again…? Yes. Because Kurson’s description appeared in his book Rocket Men, and was written about 1968. Riots erupted in the US after the assassinations of Martin Luthor King Jr. and Robert Kennedy during the year. Both men were giants in the country’s socio-political landscape.
(I want to quickly digress here and give credit to one of my favourite investment writers, Ben Carlson. I came across Kurson’s passage in one of Carlson’s recent blog posts.)
The riots that Kurson wrote about could well be used to describe what’s happening in the US today. The current social tension in the country – sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody – is heartbreaking. Even for someone like me living thousands of kilometres away in Singapore, I can feel it.
2020 has been brutal so far. Economies around the world effectively ground to a halt in the first half of the year as countries scrambled to fight against COVID-19. And nobody knows just how much psychological trauma individuals from all the affected countries have suffered because of social distancing, lockdowns, and closed businesses. And with COVID-19 still looming in the background, the George Floyd riots came crashing in.
How can the world, and the US, rebuild from all this? By slowly picking up the pieces. In the face of all this bleakness, I want to reiterate something that I wrote in a recent article on the investment blog that Jeremy and myself run called The Good Investors. This is what I wrote in the article Saying Goodbye: 10 Years, a 19% Annual Return, and 17 Investing Lessons:
“One key thing I’ve learnt about humanity is that our progress has never happened smoothly. It took us only 66 years to go from the first demonstration of manned flight by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to putting a man on the moon. But in between was World War II, a brutal battle across the globe from 1939 to 1945 that killed an estimated 66 million, according to National Geographic.
This is how progress is made, through the broken pieces of the mess that Mother Nature and our own mistakes create…
… There are 7.8 billion individuals in the world today, and the vast majority of us will wake up every morning wanting to improve the world and our own lot in life… Miscreants and Mother Nature will wreak havoc from time to time. But I have faith in the collective positivity of humanity. When there’s a mess, we can clean it up. This has been the story of our long history.”
Humanity’s progress has never been smooth. There are always things to worry about. But tomorrow will be a brighter day.
