America; What Happened?
Good Morning
I’ve got good news and bad news for you this morning, so I’ll give you the good news first.
I was reading a magazine and came across an ad for a new car that gets 50 MPG and costs less than a $1,000! That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it was a 1949 magazine. The ad was for the Crosley automobile made in
In the same magazine, R.J. Greensfield, a chemist for Shell Oil Company, won the Wood River Fuel Marathon, by driving a 1937 Desoto 74.22 miles…on one gallon of gas!
Luckily for us, technology has advanced to the point that we can buy a car today for $42,000 that approaches 18 miles per gallon.
In 1927, Ryan Aircraft designed and built the “Spirit of St.Louis” in 60 days. Charles Lindbergh, with minimal testing, flew the Spirit non stop from
In 1942, in 8 months and 11 days, the Army Corps of Engineers built 1543 miles of the most difficult road ever attempted on earth. We know it today as the “
So what happened to
Americans have turned every aspect of their lives over to government control. From home town mayor to the bloated federal bureaucracy and all of those in between, one must beg permission and pay fees for nearly any action that you wish to take.
What if the above ideas were trotted out today?
The Crosley auto? There is no way it would pass side impact and emissions tests.
The Spirit of
The
As Americans continued to increase Government involvement in our everyday lives, in all that we do, there was a cost. As we became more dependent on government to provide for us and to keep us safe from ourselves, there was a cost.
To remove all personal responsibilities and to make others responsible for even our dumbest actions, there was a cost. To allow even the most frivolous lawsuits to be brought to trial against our industries, our doctors, our neighbors and our own families, there was a cost.
That cost was the American way of life.
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I cannot help but believe that most Americans are at least somewhat happy with the way our nation has changed over the last 50 years, and with what it has become today . The way our government has taken control of our lives with not only our permission but mostly by our insistence.
The freedoms we enjoyed, Mike, years ago living in small pockets of our country, in Colorado and Alaska, with virtually no government presence or involvement or interference of any kind is for some reason not what the majority of Americans want today. We were safe. We were free to do pretty much as we pleased as long as it did not create havoc for our neighbors. Yet there was no law.
I do not believe the Americans of today are interested in being able to start a business without all the regulation, excessive fees and insurance requirements, created by our insistence, that every form of government be involved in every aspect of our lives.
How else do we explain the fact that we basically have 3 stooges running for president of the United States today? We are going to elect of of these three to lead us and they do not have a clue what is causing our economical wreck today.
How else do we explain how our government has maintained an economic policy for our country based solely on exponential growth (which has about run it’s course, like all pyramid schemes do)? How else do we explain the fact that our mentality as a nation has shriveled to the point of believing that our elected officials are capable of doing what is right without educated, informed input from a large portion of our population; that is us, you and me. -bb
BB
Good comments. We have lost the spirit of America in our quest to be a ruled class. Interestingly enough, our forefathers founded this country in order not to be a ruled class.
I suppose everything goes full circle. I remember thinking that I really didn’t understand true freedom until the United States Navy took mine for a few years.
I don’t believe that the majority of Americans want to be free. Here we are in Iraq claiming to free the people, when at home we lose freedoms daily.
Hey Mike, Those great American ideas are still out there but if you do not have a lot of money or cansell your idea to a corporation that thinks it can make a horrendous fortune with it, it will remain just an idea. I have had several drugs that I have been prescribed taken off of the market due to the patent running out or the company feeling that it can no longer make enough profit. I can go to Canada or Mexico to get these and, of course, they are much cheaper there. Instead of continuing to use standarization of parts we are trying to make each product unique in order to keep customers “loyal”(read “over-a-barrel”). The amount of greed running through our country is almost unbelievable. It seems to be an addiction! The ridiculous ends a company will go to in order to maximize their profits or keep their promise(forecast) to wall street has reached a phobic level. Employees used to be thought of as assets to a company, now they are no more than pawns. The idea of open and honest competition has been replaced by the most cutthroat of ideals. Instead of competing they feel the need to crush their competitors to the point of doing themselves harm in order to achieve their goals. One gets the feeling that the entire human race has gone bankrupt, morally and otherwise. Ah well, have yourself a good one Mike!
Michael,
You hit on one of my pet peeves with your comment regarding the corporations keeping up with Wall Street’s demands for growth.
The investors do the same thing by demanding growth or ever increasing high yields on their stock holdings.
In the end, this creates massive pressure to continually increase profits and productivity which drives the American company off shore.
At this point the investor no longer has place to work and the macro effects of a dog chasing his tail come to fruition. But by then it’s too late isn’t it?
Mike,
The ugly truth of what you point out is that we did it to ourselves. As many other great nations before us and hopefully many more after us, we fell victim to our own success. Any culture in the same situation will do the same thing.
The people who created these great inventions and innovations of the 21st century grew up, well without them. What is it that they say about “necessity”? But these inventions made our lives easier. How many millions of people have never had to kill a chicken, plow a field, walk to a grocery store, milk a cow, build a home, or the hundreds of other things that were required of a family growing up? This disconnect with reality has left people to grow ignorant. It is funny how many of these inventions have made our world physically smaller, but emotionally vast and large. Cars, planes, the internet, and other like inventions have made human interaction and dependence unnecessary. We have developed a culture that “never talks to their next door neighbor.” With out a concern for the people who live around us, greed is free to consume us. Now these large companies are so big that they control the innovation that reaches the general public. They depend upon us not talking to each other and getting our new spoon-fed to us from the popular media.
The good new is that when we crumble into economic and moralist ruin, we will be forced to find that great American spirit again.
lol,
I certainly hope that you are correct. I spent many years in the Alaska bush as a pilot among other things. That spirit that we both speak of was alive and well. I need to write a column about that subject.
I also grew up a farmer in Indiana, although my dad had outside work. I witnessed the can-do spirit of the farmer and the industrialist, one built the plow, the other fed the plow builder.
America was purposely build by strong people without the encumbrance of government interference and we have lost that.
Thanks for the thoughtful and correct comments.