If You’re Worried About the Future of Our Country, Do Something About It
27 December 2024
These excerpts are from a New York Times article are by Robert E. Rubin, the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999.
In the early 1990s, when I was a co-senior partner at Goldman Sachs, younger people sometimes asked me for advice. I told them, “First, become really good at what you do, and then branch out to get involved in activities and issues in the wider world beyond your work.”
Our country and world face unprecedented and exceedingly complex threats, yet many people might feel that advice is less applicable than it used to be. We have no shortage of reminders that many of the forces affecting our lives, not to mention world history, are beyond our control.
But I believe that for these exact reasons, civic engagement — involvement in issues beyond the immediate scope of one’s personal life and work, undertaken for the greater good, however one defines it — is more important than ever.
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