Change Must Happen

On a little side note, today, I've been reading through a very good book by Thomas L. Friedman, titled, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth-first Century, and I will take from a quote that was an answer to the author's question of what this Indian CEO's message was to the American people, in a world where the playing field has been flattened, and now India, China, Russia, and the like, are all beginning to thrive in a global technological economy. His response, that everybody [in America] needs "to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental shift...in the way people are going to do business...everyone is going to have to improve themselves and be able to compete."
That's a pretty hard statement to swallow, but in my opinion it's true. I think I can completely and utterly relate to what he has said. America is very steeped in this conservative mindset, that what has worked in the past - basically becoming prosperous to due to innovation and setting the economic pace - will work now. But it won't! Don't you see? There is a new playing field, and Americans are still playing baseball, while the rest of the world is embracing a new and completely different game.
Unemployment is rising in America because there is way too much consequence to "doing your job", and not enough focus on making your job better, and more adaptable to the new way things work. In part people have been forced out of the workforce simply because they cannot compete on the new playing field. You have a lot of people who simply resist or are reluctant to learn new technological ways to do their job. Maybe, the greater part of the workforce is technologically inadequate or incompetent (I don't know you pick one), and because it is a majority force, it resists change in the workforce, because it feels threatened, and so they turn against those who want to change the game. Either play the right game or don't play it at all!
I look at it this way, if Americans do not begin to compete, instead of settling back into the comfort of a thriving past, then we will fail to sustain ourselves as an economic power in the global scene. We would also need to open our minds to new and better practices, those of which are very different than what we're used to, but in the end, we'd benefit from connecting ourselves to the global market, which is hardily driven by other nations at this point. We will soon be falling behind in the race, to the end of the pack.