Be Bold in Your Vision

At Respectful American, we're often reminded of a quote from the 1947 movie "It's a Wonderful Life". During a Board of Directors meeting where Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) attempted to shut down the Bailey Building and Loan, he asked about a loan that had been funded for the town's taxi driver Ernie Bishop. When told he was given the loan based on his salary, insurance, and good character, Mr. Potter said, "You see, if you shoot pool with someone here you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas."

This quote reminds us of two things. First, many of our fellow citizens seem to believe in this sentiment. They consistently point to the few exceptions of people who take fraudulent advantage of the country’s social safety net programs as justification for denying public assistance to those in need. Using that logic, grocery stores would never carry perishable items like bread or milk because some of their supply doesn’t get purchased before its expiration date. Losses attributable to various reasons are so common, the term “shrinkage” is used to describe them in a non-derogatory way. There will always be some that take advantage, but the vast majority of people really need assistance from time to time in their life journey. For the richest country on Earth to deny such assistance or to put degrading requirements on their participation is not respectful.

Second, most people are able to do great things when given a chance. Those "impossible ideas" have led many well-known people to create successful business empires. They have also led many not-so-well-known people to raise their children in a responsible manner, help to produce a product or perform a service, and do charitable work helping others. All of these things are often difficult to do, and they are all great things.

Here's another movie quote. In the 2016 movie "Sully", Captain Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) was being interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board about US Airways flight 1549 on January 15, 2009. A board member pointed out that a dual-engine failure is something that had never happened before. Captain Sullenberger responded by saying, "Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time."

Many people have concerns about trying something because they’ve never tried it before, or no one else has ever tried it before. Being unprecedented doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It just means there’s more homework to do. More preparation. More trial and error. Perhaps multiple failures before success. However, if your vision is worth doing, there are almost always ways to accomplish it. We’re sure many Americans who lived in the 1960s thought landing a person on the moon was impossible. And then it wasn’t.

We have as our first bold vision a possible solution to the immigration and asylum issues that have persisted in our country for decades. It’s been thought of before, but never implemented because, at the time, it may have been a solution in search of a problem. We believe we now have a solution to a specific problem. Click here to read about our vision.