Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021

Looking into 2021, 2020 behind us, wondering where we are as a Nation. Are we looking to the future or are we languishing in the past? Maybe, for a better perspective on what we should be doing, we should consider where our ancestors were about 100 years ago in the 1920’s and how they responded.

The world has just endured a worldwide pandemic from 1918 to 1919 with the H1N1 Spanish flu, there were 500 million people worldwide infected with 50 million worldwide deaths and 675,000 deaths occurring in the United States, alone. The world had just fought the first world war lasting more than four years from 1914 to 1918. Nearly 20 million died and 21 million more were wounded during WW1 including military and civilians. The first radio station to publicly broadcast was in 1920 from KDKA in Pittsburgh. Silent movies began in 1922 and in 1926 technicolor movies were presented as the movie industry became a major part of America. A new immunization for diphtheria was developed in 1923. This was considered a great breakthrough in medicine. The model T was the Ford production car at the beginning of the 1920's and the model A was not introduced until 1927. The Ford assembly line was introduced the decade before. Before the assembly line it took 12 hours to assemble one car. The assembly line reduced the time to one hour and 33 minutes per car.

The citizens of these great United States of America in the 1920s did not languish in the events of the preceding decade. They did what we should be doing today. They went to work every day, they started inventing and they looked to the future not the past.

We should never forget our past and we should never let our past define us. We are a country of inventors and we should act like it going forward.

Embrace change. New technologies, driverless cars, flying taxis and look at Robotics and advanced manufacturing, the same way Henry Ford did. If we believe better days are ahead of us and we respond accordingly, they will be.

Now, looking ahead into the coming months of 2021, leaving 2020 behind, it’s up to the American people, the innovators and doers, to continue to change and develop our great Nation. Let us not forget the past, but continue moving forward.