This week, President Obama warned America that we were facing another “Sputnik moment,” reflecting back on the time in the Eisenhower Administration when America had to decide if it was up to funding the gazillions in taxpayer dollars to develop a space program.
If you’ve watched “The Right Stuff,” you have seen the political and scientific challenges being faced in that era.
America reacted to the Commies having a satellite overhead, frankly, because we didn’t want to get nuked from space.
It was the Mercury 7 Astronauts who got us excited about space exploration. Sure, people got wound up about science. These World War II vets were having kids by the boat-load and they wanted them to grow up and have the great jobs that science was promising.
So, how’s that working out?
We have debt — national and private — that was UNDREAMED OF when Sputnik flew over.
Americans are seeing their homes foreclosed upon at a rate that was much more fitting to the Great Depression than the Space Race.
Job growth is at a standstill, and that is only because our pundits insist on county a lost full-time, insurance-paid, livable wage job as equivalent to a found part-time, no-benefits, minimum wage position. If we really counted all the people who have been moved out of family-supporting jobs, once again, we are looking at the 1930s, not the 1960s.
As one of those who wrote about this comment noted this week, “rising economies in Asia provide the threat and possibility this time around, and Obama, much like Eisenhower half a century ago, wants the country to wake up.”
Fine.
Let’s wake up. But let’s ALL wake up.
The reason those Asian economies are booming?
Because they have virtual slave labor.
And that is clearly what we see the current “leaders” in Washington moving us towards.
Family careers are being destroyed in this culture.
Young people see the bottom falling from those positions that were considered sound just 10 years ago.
Is it any wonder they don’t see the point in cracking the books? Why? So they can flip burgers with greater insight?
Our “leaders” need to work a lot harder on caring whether working-class American families survive or not, because right now all this Sputnik talk just sounds like more blabber.
— Chuck Smith