Success Quote by Kevin Rollins

Rollins is doing the careful two-step corporate leaders often attempt when they want moral authority without sounding sanctimonious: claim “responsibility,” then immediately universalize it. “We” starts as a company or donor class, but it quickly expands into “all of us in the Western world,” a move that turns a private act (philanthropy, disaster response, CSR) into a civilizational duty. It’s inclusive on the surface; underneath, it recruits solidarity to pre-empt criticism. If everyone is implicated, no one has to ask hard questions about why this particular executive, firm, or industry is stepping in, or what benefits accrue in reputation, access, and legitimacy.

The phrase “been blessed a lot” is doing heavy rhetorical work. “Blessed” launders wealth through the language of fortune and grace, softening the sharper realities of extraction, global labor hierarchies, and trade rules that often connect Western prosperity to others’ precarity. It also functions as an emotional shortcut: gratitude is easier than accountability.

Then comes the quiet tell: “even before the tsunami.” Disasters invite charity; adding “even before” signals that the underlying inequality is chronic, not episodic. That can be read as sincere awareness, but it also frames poverty as an enduring condition of “these parts,” vaguely located and slightly othered. The vagueness keeps the statement safe for a broad audience: compassion without specificity, urgency without policy, and responsibility without naming who owes what to whom.