Laurence Lewis' front-pager about Fermilab's budget woes poked a needle into an already inflamed irritation in my brain.
My apologies in advance for the draining.
When I was a kid, the 21st Century seemed like the distant future, one I would probably never see or, if I did, be young enough to enjoy. Heck, by the time the digits rolled over, I'd be older than my dad!
But it was worth it to wait out the long years, just to see the paradise a'comin'. Flying cars. Or, for the modern "pedestrian," personal jet packs. Lunar colonies. Whole meals in a pill.
Maybe that was too optimistic a vision, but I was willing to settle for the discount version. In that future, ten years back we should have been able to fly a PanAm Clipper to a big wheel space station to eat Howard Johnson's ice cream before zipping off to the moon. And if we found anything interesting there, say, a radio beacon pointing out to some outer planet, we'd just build a big ship, pack up our sentient supercomputer, pop a few buddies in the cooler and go check it out.
And that was the conservative estimate.
Well, as the wags say, the future just ain't what it used to be.
We've fallen from the stars. We don't make the cars. I'll never get to sit and drink a bulb of beer on Mars.
Cars? Jesus. At this point, you've got to dig like an indefatigable archaeologist to find a pair of socks milled up in America.
Which is why, as lame or third-way as some might have found it, the president's speech last week got my golf claps. Here at least is one American politician who's willing to speak the truth, to tell the American people that not only is their once-dominant productivity and technological prowess fading to Second-world status, unless we are willing to make some serious investments in education, tech and infrastructure, Third's just up the potholed turnpike.
Were his proposals sufficiently comprehensive, his warnings realistically dire? Heck, no. He's the damned president making a damned speech.
But it was good to hear somebody with some chance of making an impact on policy fess up the awful truth: unless we get serious about funding education, the future's going to be nothing more than an old movie on cable.