SOTU = Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!
By Justin “filthy liberal nerd” Rosario
Everyone takes away something different from a speech, particularly one as far ranging as a State of the Union address. Some will focus on the war efforts and START treaty. Others will focus on tax cuts and loopholes. Me? Twenty minutes into tonight’s SOTU all I could hear was the scream of Ogre, “NEEEEEEERRRRRRRRDDDDDSSSSSS!!!!”
And how sweet it sounded. If you haven’t noticed by now, I am a nerd. I love science in all of its geeky glory. I love astronomy, biology, nanotechnology, geology, all of it. I embraced my inner dweeb years ago when I decided being smart was nothing to be ashamed of. It’s time for the rest of the country to join me in total dweebdom and President Obama agrees:
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal.”
I grew up reading about the Space Race and wondered how amazing it must have been to be alive at such a time. As a child born in the early 70s, my adolescence was shaded by the knowledge that Japan was more technologically savvy then we were and we had lost our edge. Even their cartoons were (and still are) better!
Even as the United States struggled to reclaim our place as smartest kid on the planet, the luster of learning was gone. Teachers were not revered or paid well and our schools declined rapidly. I graduated with kids would could barely write a coherent sentence. But sports stars, and later, reality TV stars, were treated as royalty. Again, the President agrees:
“We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.”
Other countries understand and appreciate that teachers are the building block of a successful nation:
“In South Korea, teachers are known as “nation builders.” Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.”
Yes. Yes it is. A good teacher can change the world by inspiring the right student. It’s time we had more of them:
“If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child – become a teacher. Your country needs you.”
And it’s more than just education. We need to fund research into the technologies that will control the world over the next century. Solar power, super computers, electric cars and the like will be the greatest job creation engines in our lifetimes. But we have to get there first.
“We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time… With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”
I recently wrote that we had no chance to regain our “smart kid” status[1] and until we remember how to unleash our inner nerd, we won’t. But “The Big Bang Theory” getting renewed for three seasons and this SOTU speech gives me hope that America can still put the coke bottle glasses back on, dust off the pocket protectors and get back to making science fiction writers work harder to keep up with reality like we used to.
Live long and prosper, you filthy liberal scum!
[1] http://addictinginfo.org/new/?page_id=531
I was born in 53, and remember the big black and white TVs being wheeled into our classrooms every time there was a space shot-it was an exciting time. I ended up becoming bilingual in large part due to the National Defense Education act’s introducing foreign language instruction into the elementary schools-starting young enough, and with my school system setting up a well articulated program, I was taking junior level French courses in my freshman year in college and speaking with no discernable accent. That being said, the “good old days” were not great in many ways-although my teachers seemed a lot closer to the “best and the brightest” than many I’ve met lately, they were poorly paid-most held summer jobs to make ends meet, particularly since many school systems did not pay them year round. `But where we really seem to have lost out is in encouraging kids’ curiosity and desire to learn and question. In the mid 80s a business major in one of the college French classes I was teaching interrupted what I admit was a digression to ask “Will this be on the test?”, a question which never would have occurred to me. Evaluating our schools based largely on multiple-choice tests can’t really measure those qualities, and they can’t be neglected if we’re hoping to graduate creative, innovative thinkers.
We have dumbed down as a country, gotten fat and comfortable in front of our techie toys. We have turned over our compassion to the churches. We are afraid of taking risks and use lawyers to take care of our owies. If China continues to rise and we continue to slip down the economic ladder, it is our fault, not the fault of our leaders. We, after all, elected dimbulbs such as Michelle Bachman, George Bush and a host of tea party novices. It seems we can’t be bothered with the ‘work hard’ ethic of our grandparents. Our own kids are disgusted with us and what we have done to our planet. Obama offers us hope. Do we have the courage to take him up on the difficult tasks ahead??? I’ll not hold out much hope for the short term, but waiting won’t get us anything but more of the same fluff and fantasy.
Knowing the track record og the Antiprogress GOP. not Obama, nothing will happen. Expect the GOP to prevent anything which benefits the US and the Average American to be trashed!!
The government cannot do this alone.
As Michael Moore correctly laments in “Capitalism: A Love Story,” the people who, as he put it, should have been this generation’s rocket scientists were instead working for the banks. Instead of helping design the cutting-edge technologies of today and tomorrow, they were designing financial instruments that skirted the law and helped set the stage for a financial systems failure that nearly sank the entire world into a Greater Depression. This failure, BTW, has not been averted, but only postponed. We will all continue to be in danger until the people and institutions responsible for that failure are punished and adjusted to help insure that it won’t happen again. Our President, the ideological heir to Neville Chamberlain, has refused to show the leadership necessary to accomplish this.
It will take a great deal of effort to get people with minds of that caliber away from the owners and into the company of the producers.
I, personally, hope that our President has the courage of conviction to see it through. Given his track record, however, I don’t see that happening.