Jim's story for the September 24 Bulletin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was Monday, September 17, 2018, and President Ken Deemer started the meeting with Kathleen Murphy telling us to "be a rainbow in someone's cloud" and to "throw something back."....David Gendron and Chris Ullman are working with Kinecta to partner with us on "Vet Fest" on the true Veterans Day, November 11, to honor veterans with beer, barbecue and music....Kathleen Terry reminded us we're a sponsor of Rotary's International Peace Day in Hermosa Beach, an interfaith dialogue and much more.....The same Kathleen Terry is being honored on October 6 with the Above and Beyond Award from the Angel Light Academy's Leadership Training Institute....Jason Wallace and Chris Ullman are organizing more dine-arounds.

 

President Ken bestowed upon Bob Lanahan, our club techie and global grant expert who seems to show up for everything, the honorific, Rotarian of the Month.  Said Ken:  When you need something, who you gonna call?

 

Wade Austin ignored the game's outcome and thanked Austin, Texas for being a good host town when USC visited the Longhorns.....Lee Walker, one of several club members who came to us from the Westwood club, celebrated a Westwood Rotarian's 111th birthday....Deb Robertson enjoyed a trip to Colorado with Tom Jeffry's wife, Maryrose.....Jordan Holbert, with her young son in hand, was on the field for a recent Dodger game, having purchased special tickets at Celebrate Manhattan Beach....Bill Bloomfield announced that Susan and he are moving from The Strand to the Village ("Someone wanted our house more than we did") and have also leased a home in Park City.

 

Bill Bloomfield introduced our guest speaker, Sam Feinberg, cofounder of Helena, a "think tank that executes."  Sam is 22 and dropped out of Yale after two years because he could wait no longer to help save the world.  He has a membership already of high level politicians, Nobel Prize winners, generals and more, including many under age 25, an age at which people are "more receptive to rapid change."  He described several examples of Helena's mission to seek out good ideas and then implement them.

 

For example, generic drugs can be productively repurposed, but the drug companies have little incentive to do so.  So Helena finds those who have incentive--insurance companies, government medical programs--to do the work.  Another example is climate change--there are plenty of programs to stop pollution, but Helena is looking at systems to pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.  Most dramatically, Helena is looking for ways to protect our vulnerable electric power grid from cyber attacks, solar flares, terrorists, and EMP (Electronic Magnetic Pulse, wherein a nuclear bomb detonated a mile high could wipe out most of America's electricity, with catastrophic results).  (Some of the solutions are pathetically simple--install insulation, and create disconnected microgrids.)

 

It used to be that Rotarians were all over 40, and clubs struggled to not look like senior citizen centers, but for at least 20 years Rotary has campaigned for younger membership.  Our 22-year-old speaker reminded us that younger people are indeed more receptive to rapid change.  (Folks my age may not know much about cell phones, but our grandchildren are there to help us.)  By the same token, our club's youngest members are not just our future, but our present, lifeblood.  We are doing better than most clubs in recruiting millenials and their confreres, but it's not too soon to go out and gather in some more.