We need a new Manhattan Project in this country, and in the whole world, and we need it right now.
In the 1940s, a project called “the Manhattan project” took shape in the United States. An enormous amount of resources was focused on creating a nuclear weapon that could help the United States to win World War II.
I have thought for a long time that we needed a new Manhattan Project, something so huge, and so groundbreaking that the resources of the entire United States, and perhaps of all the world would be needed to accomplish it. I thought that it would be something focused on hardware, such as wind power and solar power, so that we could break our dependency on fossil fuels; and it would be accompanied by parallel projects in transportation and home and industrial energy usage.
Now I have realized that this cannot happen without laying the groundwork, and this means education.
Perhaps you're wondering why education is being systematically gutted; why old, polluting technologies such as nuclear, so-called “clean coal”, and petroleum are being pushed by an administration that promised change; why the new “health care” laws have been sold out to insurance companies, and why financial regulation has been brought to a halt.
Of all of these, the first is the one that has to be most urgently addressed. Without education, there can be absolutely no progress. I believe that this is why education has been systematically gutted since the days of Ronald Reagan. The United States used to be the leader in science; now we are lagging far behind certain nations that were, until recently, considered Third World.
I have had a tendency to blame conservative groups such as religious groups and racist organizations such as anti-immigrant groups for this dumbing-down of the United States; but now I have come to believe that it is actually certain multinational organizations and corporations whose profits would be impacted by having a well-educated and well-informed population.
I believe that these organizations include:
–The petroleum industry and everything associated with it, including automobile manufacturers
–The agricultural industry and allied industries such as Monsanto
–The entertainment industry including the so-called mass media conglomerates
–The political industry (yes, it's an industry; look at the billions spent and how much the politicians, lobbyists, and political workers are paid)
–The military-industrial complex.
These industries are the albatrosses around our collective neck; they are one of the main causes for our lack of evolution, and their main tool is ignorance.Orwell was correct when he said “ignorance is strength”; keeping people ignorant goes hand-in-hand with keeping them enslaved to technologies that should've disappeared centuries ago. I am truly ashamed to think that we are still slaves to reciprocating engines, a technology from the 18th century, when electric engines are so much more efficient; but I am not surprised, considering the profits to be made from petroleum engines.
President Obama was right when he said that change is needed; the problem is that changes been made almost impossible by these incredibly conservative industries. It is they who drive public opinion, who sustain and maintain the anti-intellectual bias that is turning us into a fourth world nation. Recently, somebody said that Saudi Arabia could not move into the first world with its “glacial pace” of change; but the fact is that it is we, right here in the United States, who foster this “glacial pace of change” by having our own version of it.
It is a meme among certain political circles that teachers are overpaid; in reality, it is politicians, CEOs, lobbyists, and the very people who are spreading this meme who are vastly overpaid. They are the ones who are keeping our nation in ignorance, precisely because it is profitable for industries that, in a civilized world, would be obsolete. It's as if the manufacturers of buggy whips were running the government and the media, and keeping gasoline engines from being developed. We are being enslaved by these people who profit from ignorance and inertia.
This is why it is my opinion that we need a new Manhattan Project, one that focuses on education before anything else. We need to restore our pride in good education, in literacy, in being well-informed. It's not the NASCAR dad, but the soccer mom that needs to be our national hero. Culture, education, a cosmopolitan outlook; these are the things that need to be cultivated now. We need to do away with the “good ol' boy” stereotype and replace it with the “it's cool to be smart” meme, and we need to do it immediately, before our nation sinks to the status of a fifth world nation.
The floor is yours.