 Look around, not at your world, but the world. The most powerful leaders seem unable to formulate a creative vision for a more harmonious world. Or perhaps they lack the courage to confront their own people and force long overdue transformations. Or maybe they just don't have the discipline to make physical a new, more constructive approach that works with the Earth instead of raping it. Large groups must have quality leadership. I'm always asked, man, what's new in jazz? And I always say, people will start listening to it. People laugh, but I'm serious. Change requires an evolution and personal behavior. It requires us to confront ourselves and consider what we are willing to sacrifice to manifest the deeper engagement and the substantive penetrating corrections we envision. If not, we're going to see more of the same. Masters of the universe, masters of the universe running around and playing with fire like children, assuming nothing serious could ever happen, arrogance. If you walk out onto a ledge, anything could happen. Nothing stays as they are until they don't. These supreme masters know us of everything. Heads of international agencies with huge budgets and four-letter acronyms did mean something very important, wheeling and dealing at the tops of all of our corrupt governments, smiling and filling the world with weapons and violent rhetoric when not brazenly committing acts of outright violence against weaker opponents and gaming everything and everyone, like a street corner hustler, what could help us to see ourselves? Why can't we understand? We are so absolutely out of alignment with our own stated values. We bring our level of corruption with us wherever we go. Our young people are suffering from all kinds of mental illness. From the trash we've put into our system. We ran our own large economies into the ground and then propped them up by giving more public money to the very people who stole. We are the ones making, fawning, self-aggrandizing entertainment products that show us heroically running around the world in a fantasy, killing people that we have actually aggressed as if they are aggressing us. We are the ones torturing and wrongfully imprisoning innocent people loudly, openly and unapologetically as if their lives and their families have absolutely no value. We use the halls of very addition and scholarship to obscure basic language and double down on indefensible positions with so-called expert opinions. Our religious institutions have waged a centuries-long war against the teachings of our own savior to will political power, locked down enormous wealth and abused the trust of its believers in the name of a Lord who took a vow of poverty and whose principal teaching was love. Consider this, the entire legacy of jazz. All of the music is a beacon and inheritance in a grave warning. Look at all the fantastic civilizations that have come and gone, what the ancient books and arts tell you. Self-importance and the sense that you're entitled to something that's for everyone is fatal. You see the same dynamics that we have seen and the fundamental change is actually the much easier path. Oh, masters of the universe, reconsider your line in the sand because your assurance that your contribution is honorable and will be sanctified in the future and forever is foolish. This is the only fact that is forever out here. Human beings are on earth and can't figure that out.