As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation

Besides the elections, the most important news story of the moment is the ECONOMY. The news is not good as we are deluged with stories of a bouncing stock market, skyrocketing foreclosures, and recession angst.

Speaking earlier this week at a workshp for unemployed professionals, I found myself remembering a phrase from my grade school Maine history course -- "As Maine goes, so goes the nation." I challenged the group to think about what we in Maine could do if we decided to lead the nation -- why not the world? -- into an era of unprecedented prosperity. I've thought about that quite a bit in the intervening hours.

What if we decided to skip a recession and create unprecedented propserity? Wouldn't that be fun?

One of the participants in the workshop commented that Maine has the highest percentage of small business folks in the nation. I had heard that per capita we have the highest number of writers and publishers. What a marvelous resource for creating prosperity!

What do we also have? A long-standing history (i.e., memory) of being on the lower end of the US economic scale, a long-standing belief in the honor of being poor and "making do," and a governmental infrastructure not supportive of small business.
I believe that we've also bought into a belief in our limitation. What if we decided to believe in our unlimited potential and possibilities

What a wonderful thought: the idea of maine becoming the model for booming prosperity. What fun. For those of you who are old enough to have expereinced Kennedy's challenge for us to put a man on the moon in the sixties, this is a parallel situation.

At the time that Kennedy created the challenge, we did not have the technology, the money, or the man power. We had/created the committment and that made all the difference. What if we created the comittment to be the birthplace of a new, expanded version of FUNancial Freedom?

In another writing (http://authorandgrowrich.com/blog/first-contestant-in-the-authorandgrowrichcom-trump-the-donald-contest, I have proposed Heifer International as a model of "we-sponsible wealth." Unlike in the sixties, we DO have the human power, we do have the technology, and we do have the money. All we have to do is to create the belief and the committment!

As Maine goes...