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Red State Guy recently posted an excellent Rant called Rocket Ship, and while I disagreed with the rant, the central point was valid.
The United States needs something to inspire its youth. When Kennedy took office he gave a stirring speech that moved the nation. He proposed sending a man to the moon and returning him safely. The nation rallied behind him, math and science education leapt forward and we did the job.
This was in many ways an inspirational time and Red no doubt would like to re create the good times of that era by resurrecting a drive to bring men back to the moon.
Unfortunately I doubt that we would want to return to those times, even if we could. The best reason perhaps is the, Been There Done That, argument. People won’t get inspired by doing something that is no longer new or challenging.
The second reason is that the Cold War is over. We would not have gone to the moon were it not for sputnik and Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight that circled the earth. People were afraid that Russia was ahead of us in rocket science and they were scared to death that they might send those rockets to attack America loaded with nuclear warheads.
Most of the people in the younger generation have no comprehension of how fearful those times were. They do not realize that we came within a whiskers width of destroying the entire earth and all life on it, during the missile standoff with Cuba or several other tense times that threatened the world with nuclear assured destruction. We laugh today at the naivety of school kids, ducking and covering, in practice sessions where we crouched under our desks in fear, but those fears were real. The threat and the danger were real.
The space race was just as important in that cold war conflict with Russia as Cuba, Berlin, or Laos. Everyone in our country rolled up their sleeves in an effort reminiscent of the victory gardens and the sacrifices of World War II. We won the race to the moon, and we won the cold war.
And there were a few tangible benefits to that effort. Sure we got things like Tang, Velcro and plastics form that effort, but what was more important was that we trained an entire generation of young people in math and science and we learned to value education.
That investment in our youth resulted in a vibrant economy and innovative research that propelled us into being the only superpower in the world.
We take that title for granted and we have become fat and lazy. (Literally and Figuratively).
The United States used to be the best at everything. We used to be the apotheosis and role model to which all of the developing nations aspired. We have looked down upon other nations as inferior and thought them incapable of even competing with us. Our hubris and arrogance has blinded us to the fact that we stopped trying to be great, while other nations have continued to strive. We no longer value education. We sneer at our scientists and experts and prefer to vote for ignorant personalities that personify Joe Sixpack more than they do John F. Kennedy. We no longer value the best and the brightest and this has cost us.
The hubris and incompetence of the previous administration used up the good will of the world and it has been replaced in many cases with revulsion. We no longer have the best of everything. We are 37th in health care, we are 31st in education, and if you look at any single issue, you can find examples of people doing things better than we somewhere in the world. The vast majority of our citizens can’t speak any other’s language and we can’t understand other cultures, so they continue to be ignorant of the real world, but in the East a dragon is rising up to challenge our preeminence, and we are unprepared to fight that battle.
China has a billion people that are hard working and industrious. They value education and they are now graduating more PHD engineers and scientists than the United States. While Americans don’t save anything and are in hock to the credit card companies, the Chinese save 30% of their income. While our country is only slowly coming out of this recession, and are mired in $12 trillion debt, China, our creditors, have an economy that is growing at 10% per year. China was able to spend more on stimulus and they were able to invest more in renewable energy research and development and so they now lead the world in renewable energy production, and they will be getting most of the green jobs in the green revolution that is now taking place.
Yes we need to inspire America again! We need a goal that challenges us and we need to regain our innovation and preeminence. There are plenty of challenges out there. We don’t need to go to the moon again. Our own world is in terrible shape and we desperately need to save the world and the disappearing creatures that we are forcing into extinction. We need to inspire people to kick the fossil fuel dependency that fosters terrorism. We need to inspire people to conserve energy, save water, and live simpler lives. We need to roll up our sleeves and take control of our country again and pay off our horrendous debt. We need people to value education again and we will need a massive number of engineers and scientists to develop sustainable green technologies, reverse global warming, and to meet the challenges of the next generation. We need to fight a new technological war with China, to keep from being dependant on them for tomorrow’s energy and production.
People of this nation need to rally around our leader in this struggle. We need to roll up our sleeves and work hard like we did during World War II and like we did during the Space Race. We need to listen to our scientists, engineers, and experts when they tell us our world is threatened, and we need to sacrifice to eliminate that threat. Our Republican representatives need to stop saying no to everything that the president proposes and start doing their job, solving our nation’s problems.
Most of the ideas in the health care reform bill were ideas that Republicans proposed when Clinton was in power. Most of the proposals in the job creation proposals have been proposed by the Republicans in the past. The idea to make a bipartisan commission to determine the best way to eliminate our deficit was a Republican idea. Yet all of these ideas were voted down by the Republicans because they are dedicated more to making Obama fail than they are to helping the ailing nation.
The Republicans may have some good ideas, but they need to do their jobs and work with the Democrats to get their ideas into law. If they refuse to support any legislation no matter how many Republican amendments are added, the Democrats have no incentive to add those amendments. Politics is not war in which everything is sacrificed to beat the enemy. Politics is the art of the compromise, in which the good of the nation is more important than the victory of the party.