On White Noise
This is a holiday letter as 2018 closes, but I cannot wax too poetically about the season or the past year, given the great insurance professionals we lost and given this past year’s growing factionalism in seemingly everything. I mean everything. The incessant white noise, the insane bickering on TV, whether its Fox or MSNBC or just Chris Cuomo and KellyAnne Conway on CNN slapping each other verbally, interrupting and getting…no where, or those crowded restaurants with boosted ambient amps of throbbing music to make you eat faster or shout louder or that infernal repetition of Santa Claus and his reindeer songs in every store everywhere to make you buy more, faster and perhaps under a spirit of some nostalgia. While I like a lot of what the President has done, I admit to Trump fatigue, ennui, irritation, malaise. I really do not care about Stormy Daniels or Michael Cohen or Menendez of Ocasio Cortez or the many arrests of public officials or the cast of characters to whom we have been treated—on both sides of the aisle—this past year. For one, I care about getting past it all to some new plateau of public discourse. America is electing crooks and major incompetents in the absence of the best and the brightest stepping up. We are at risk of mediocrity as a nation and strangulation of our sense of national pride, as a consequence. Were it not for private industry’s initiative and capital, the inertia would be poured upon us by an assortment of subjective journalists, filthy mouthed actors and actresses who have the public spotlight and by irresponsible elected officials who operate under assumed mandates. It just has not been a beautiful year, whether financially successful or not. Not beautiful. Insurers have little to do – happily – with this sour sense of the present, as long as the promises are kept and the marketing a-political and not politically correct, just straight and clear. The industry stands to do well under the Trump economy, especially if the undoing of the ACA is realized. But somewhere there needs to be a sense of the good and the beautiful again in what we all do every day. I pray for that.
Not a very cheery column, but please take from it what I hope is a shared wish: for a return of that dimension of beauty in the lives of all of our readers, beyond material success and beyond the holding of “things”. It is worth striving for and I pledge to do that in the New year as a gift to my family.
May you and yours have a Blessed Holiday Season and a richly beautiful New Year. Steve Acunto
