Frustrating

Opinions are like buttholes … everybody has one.  So here is mine.

We the People are at a point in our nation’s history where we are coasting down the other side of the mountain of greatness we built.  While we sit around spewing partisan bullshit about gun rights and debating whether or not a man can love a man and a woman love a woman, the rest of the world is leaving us in the dust in the very thing we more or less invented: technology.

Innovation in the United States led to most of the technology we take for granted.  We invented it, gave it away free, stopped reinventing it, let the rest of the world get ahead of us with it and are now frantically paying to buy it back.  We were the leaders, the power center of the planet, then we got lazy, complacent, greedy, indifferent.  Countries we like to ridicule, like China, quietly and steadily passed us by.

Every great empire eventually falls but I never thought I’d see the day when our great nation would be less than Number One.  Sorry about the negatives … problem is that I speak the truth.  It’s not if, it’s when.  I hope we can change it.  I hope our decline slows down, maybe even turns around in my life time.  Current evidence says it won’t, especially in the area of science and technology.

The man from India who drives a taxi or runs a convenience store, the man who is often the punch line of a joke, has a son or daughter who will cure cancer and sell us the cure at the price of their choosing  It’s the American way, isn’t it?  The Chinese man who runs the neighborhood laundry or take-out restaurant, also the brunt of jokes, has a relative who will produce what boomers used to call the Dick Tracy watch … a two-way telecommunication device worn on the wrist, only this one will have ten times the computing power of a the latest iPhone and the small print on the back will say Made In China.

Again, I’m sorry for the negatives but we are watching it happen and are doing nothing about it.  And I don’t mean enacting ‘America first’ laws; that misses the point.  I mean we’re not encouraging science studies, for example.  We’re too busy whining about Republicans and Democrats.

I hate to end on this sour note, but it is what it is.  It is frustrating.