Feels like we're not even trying to pretend like we're reaching for greatness. I am far less in love with the country then I once was; there is little audacity to reach for more as a country on many fronts (infrastructure, healthcare, education, general well being, connectivity).
That's the thing. We talk a big game, think technology can solve anything, but then when it comes down to basics, we say "Nah, too hard...too much space, etc etc".
Since 2001, America has spent an average of ~$300 billion dollars per year on the nebulous war in the Middle East.
Terrorists are media-hyped paper cuts compared to over 1 million Americans a year dying due to heart disease and cancer ($11B/y federal R&D) - not to mention Alzheimers, diabetes, obesity... and, to be blunt, you and almost everyone you know will probably die from one of those diseases.
For perspective: on average terrorism kills ~79 Americans per year (including 9/11). There are 121 American suicides per day.
The math doesn't make sense on any level. $300B/y killing people thousands of miles away and directly fueling increased hatred towards our nation... and a mere $11B/y invested in heard disease + cancer, which saves millions of citizen's at home.
Even pie-in-the-sky research like fusion is a better investment. Fusion would solve or mitigate large global problems, including terrorism, yet it receives a mere 1/1000th the funding level as our wars.
The real problem is we keep voting for the establishment parties because we believe that "3rd party will never win" dogma both parties roll out.
Remember this: Nobody won the 2016 popular vote.
40% of Americans didn't vote last year, 30% voted Trump, 30% voted Clinton - and many of those 30% were compromise voters that would have preferred a different primary candidate, or simply voted against the opponent's candidate.
This is democracy. If we want something different, we have to vote for someone different.
Yes... and starting a couple of days ago, the media has been really playing up the NK threat.. a real change -- in the past, Kim would make threats, and basically be ignored.. but now the same threats are front page news.
So of course we don't have money for any of those things... we need to save it for NK.
i'm less in love with national greatness than i once was.
IMHO, a tolerable mediocrity across every field would be better than national greatness if that mediocrity were uniformly distributed across the country and its residents.
