Author
Jerry H. Parisella is an author, semi-retired pension consultant, former talent development professional, previous corporate banker and a U. S. Air Force veteran. He was born in Washington, DC, grew up in Massachusetts, earned a Bachelors Degree summa cum laude in political science at Gordon College and a Masters Degree in international affairs at Georgetown University. He and his wife, Anna, who earned her Bachelors Degree in Kyiv, Ukraine and later emigrated to the United States, currently make their home in New York City with their rescued sweet Dachshund, Melissa.
Jerry considers himself an average, middle class, centrist American. He started his career as a corporate banker, managing financial relationships with Fortune 1000 companies. After seventeen years in corporate finance, he made a mid-career change to serve as the U.S. Managing Director of a London-based executive education company. After eight years, he and a business school professor launched their own company, designing onsite and online talent development programs for clients in America and Europe. After seven years, he returned to the financial space, taking a position as a pension consultant.
While working over four decades, he also variously volunteered in an education outreach program for the homeless, sat on a grants committee to assess the eligibility of non-profit organizations, participated in entertainment programs for seniors and wrote the book, Stop Eating The Animals. He is of Italian-American and Romanian ancestry. His father, Henry, born in the U.S. of Italian immigrants who came to America in 1900, spent his career working for the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC and at embassies in Europe. Jerry’s mother, Angela, was born in Romania when it was a constitutional monarchy and as a young bride fled the Communist regime in 1948 to make a new life with Henry in the United States where she later gave birth to Jerry in 1954.
Jerry’s family history, foreign travel, military service, exposure to the three main traditions of Christianity, volunteering, large corporate, international and small business experience and long professional career have together shaped his political, economic, social and spiritual views. He has seen how American freedom and opportunity are unrivalled in the world, how oppressive governments deny people their God-given rights, how corrupt governments aggregate power to themselves to the detriment of their citizens and how failing governments and tribal rivalries deny their residents basic safety and life’s essentials. Each time he returns home from travelling abroad he asks himself, “How can we preserve what is good, noble and works well in the United States?” And “How can we resolve the problems that our country faces today so that future generations won’t inherit them?”
His intent in sharing his observations in this book is to contribute to public discourse by drawing attention to certain problematic practices that have crept into contemporary American society and to offer suggestions from a transpartisan, common sense perspective. His hope is that we can leverage the diversity of our life experiences and collaborate on common ground to get us closer to that ‘more perfect union’ noted in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.
