OpEd:
The Decimation of a Generation’s Future
June 11, 2009 by Kyle BradyTags: America, Creationism, Economy, Evolution, Future, Government, Obama, Politics, Religion, Science
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My generation, which I think of as children of the 80's and early 90's, is supposed to be the future. We're supposed to be the generation that guides computing and technology to the edge of physics; the generation that is widely thought to be the first to see civilian space travel and the beginning of the colonization of space; the generation that many are depending on to solve the many global problems like hunger, poverty, and inhuman regimes. Not to mention being heralded as the future conquerors of sickness and disease, along with a host of other issues we're told will be eradicated in our lifetimes.
But there's a problem: if current trends continue, all of this will be impossible. The even scarier fact is that we may be the first generation in decades (centuries?) to see a reversal of intellectual progress.
Take a look at the state of the Western world. Over the last two decades, at least, wheels have been set in motion that are all but impossible to stop, and the situation is only worsening. For the sake of familiarity and semi-simplicity, I'm going to focus on America - but the following applies just as easily to the state of the Western world as a whole.
Politics
One of the central, and continuing, problems is politics. Not the idea of politics, nor the institution, but the people that have come to infest the system over the long arms of Time: rich, old, white men are elected to Congress and abuse their powers; lobbyists for shady corporate interests largely control the discussions and decisions of said Congressionals; the only issues discussed or addressed properly, at every level of government, are those that will win a re-election or bring in campaign financing... the list goes on, and it's not news to those who pay attention. For the last twenty years, this has worked for most issues simply because there were no major crises or crucial decision points - besides the "war on terrorism", the country has only had to address trivial issues.
Within the last year we've seen crisis after crisis, a systemic failure of Old World industries and ideas that have caused cascading problems. But when the time comes for Congress to help the American people they claim to represent, they banter over party politics, point fingers, and go crusading over the most useless of points - every time. Even appointing a rather uninteresting and uncontroversial individual for a Supreme Court position takes months, thanks to the arbitrary opposition and accusation.
Furthermore, these same politicians spend government money on pet projects for their financial backers, the largest and most pervasive of which are so-called energy ("oil") companies, the healthcare industry, Big Tobacco, and copyright terrorists like the RIAA or MPAA. But the real issues get pushed around (as seen by the bailout process), or ignored completely. Education funding continues to be cut while salaries and benefits for many government employees rise, and specific educational programs are discontinued to make room for activities like hunting down marijuana growers or prosecuting 10 yr. old children for allegedly downloading a song or two off the internet.
Those that are elected to represent us do not resemble, at all, the demographics of our country or interests. In fact, they are more akin to the million-dollar executives of corporations than they are the average citizen, and their actions show this. Issue after issue proves to be another failure for the interests of the people, for which the only option seems to be waiting for the current set of politicians to be eventually replaced by the next generation - gay marriage is a perfect example of this. My generation is largely indifferent, at worst, about the issue, but it has yet to be legalized: the older generation, and a religious fanatic subset (more on them later) are preventing this.
But politics are just the beginning.
Intelligence
There was a time when it may not have been "cool" to be a nerd (unlike today), but intelligence as a whole was valued. Parents watched over their children to make sure homework was completed, school teachers pushed their students (instead of catering to the lowest common denominator), and graduating from college was actually an achievement (aka "difficult"). Books were read, theatre was intelligent, and issues were discussed among ordinary people.
No longer is this true.
The public school system caters to the dumbest of the class, aiming only to get more funding than the year previous - essentially teaching for the tests. A common topic of discussion among ordinary people is the previous night's episode of a reality TV show or brain-numbing "drama", rather than world news or even politics. Entertainment itself has degraded, with the majority of TV showcasing idiots and their adventures, and plays are no longer witty satire, instead choosing to produce stage versions of movies or books.
Even more frightening is that books are not considered a valid form of entertainment any longer - which shouldn't be a surprise, given the average reading level of today's people. Instead of reading news from the source via the Internet, newspapers, or slightly-biased publications like TIME or Newsweek, people choose to watch CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC, where the goal is not to inform you, but to make advertising money.
Semi-legitimate outlets like CNN or MSNBC focus largely on American politics, with a sidedish of celebrity news and the occasional sensationalized humanity piece - not exactly the real issues of our society. Considerably worse is the insult on intelligence known as Fox News, parading crazy and irrational opinion pieces as news and fact - with many people not able to differentiate. The BBC does a better job than American news outlets by an order of magnitude, but the real gem is NPR, where they provide both views/sides to a story and feature issues the American public typically don't even know exist.
Perhaps worse is the perception of intelligence - nerds may have been finally accepted by the general population, but any show of intelligence outside of a mob-ruled norm is seen as elitism. We don't need to crucify the intelligent members of our society, let alone force them to make excuses for their knowledge and insight. But this social perception has trickled-down for long enough that high school children no longer are interested in math and science (a problem seen during the beginning of the Cold War and the Apollo-era), and are instead interested in banking, business, lawyers, and sports. Need proof? Just look at college graduates - there has been a recent rise in sciences and engineering, but the net result is still negative. The majority of graduates from universities and four-year colleges are focused in areas of business, finance/economics, or pre-law. Not engineering, pre-med, or the sciences.
President Obama would like to fix this, and has made a few small babysteps towards funding such an educational retooling, but government spending is just the beginning. As Intel has so appropriately stated in their recent commercials, "rockstars" of the programming/engineering world are not like John Mayer or Axl Rose, but they're nonetheless important... something our society needs to quickly relearn. Instead of idolizing a mediocrely-talented female popstar that gained success via a series of TV-based exploitation, we should be idolizing, or at least recognizing the brilliance of, our scientists and engineers that continue to push us into the technological future.
But just being interested in science or engineering isn't enough... our economy needs to be organized to once again support such endeavours.
Economy
Countless American business icons have created small business ownership as part of the American Dream for many modern citizens, including the part where "small business" becomes "large conglomerate". This is not a bad thing, especially given that America is essentially a long string of innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs over our short history. Where it takes a turn, however, is the recent focus on banking, retail, and food services as the industries of interest.
Most of our modern society is based on complex electronics, and yet many people seem to disregard this fact. Why should we care about being able to implement, maintain, and innovate the very basis of our lives? I hope you caught the sarcasm.
Silicon Valley used to be a bastion of computer and electronics excellence, as little as ten years ago. Nowadays, it's a mess of imported immigrants, manufacturing/production outsourcing, and short-sighted idealism, where profits, IPOs, and trendy acronyms are more important than true innovation. And it's not alone.
Billions of dollars have been spent in "saving" industries, only to have them fail at a slower pace - this is investing in the past, not the future. The stock market only facilitates the problem, punishing companies that dare to take risks and don't manage to post continual profit gains.
And, as companies continue to fall like dominoes, no-one thinks to question the system itself.
Capitalism
Capitalism is a brilliant idea in theory, but true laissez-faire capitalism is likely to never work - this is something we're discovering only now, after a century of work and a decade of deregulation. It is a mix of appropriate government regulation and capitalism that would be most likely to work (look to the era of FDR for a precedent), but the country is loathe to move in this direction.
Deregulation of industries has resulted in unadulterated chaos: telcos have free reign to largely operate as they wish; broadband providers of all types filter traffic, while claiming they don't, and operate de facto local monopolies; a privatized for-profit health care system refuses to provide the most basic of services to those that pay for them; a banking system built on trust and basic intelligence has collapsed on itself thanks to greed and tunnel-vision.
These are facts, and no-one will dispute that they have occurred. However, in all the discussion of our current state, people are reluctant to discuss the regulation of industries. President Obama has mentioned it in terms of healthcare, and the FCC has expressed interest in regulating broadband+telcos, but the conservatives are immediately lashing against it on principle - despite that it is an attempt to reverse our recent declines.
Regulation across all industries is neither appropriate nor feasible - our current stance on the precipice is a combination of deregulation and corporate greed, but uneven regulation is just as much to blame. The heavy regulation of certain industries, and the complete disregard of others by the federal government, causes a dangerous climate of government (non)intervention.
As an example, heavier regulation of manufacturing could bring untold jobs back to the United States in countless industries, where they currently reside in China, Japan, India, and South Korea. This would, almost overnight, solve the production outsourcing problem.
But the debt being accrued at an alarming rate to "fix" what is solidly broken is going to prevent this.
Debt
Count up the money spent within the last 10 years, look at the income of the country as a whole, and then take a look at American debt - both federal and personal. How are we supposed to repay this?
Personal debt is usually assumed to be paid off sometime before the debtor's death, despite the credit revolution being relatively new and having no precedent. But the reality is that children (my generation) are going to likely be stuck with their parents debt after they die, adding to our own personal debt accrued by going to school, living out of our means, or any number of other sources.
The federal debt isn't that different - it's not going to be paid back quickly, and it's going to require taxes staying as-is, if not increasing (rather than being cut) for a number of years. The money is being dispensed like candy to small children, and it's being done so by a group that may not even be alive 15 years from now - let alone be concerned about dealing with the debt.
By being in such massive debt, there are going to be consequences. We've already seen the beginnings of this at the state-level, as California goes broke and will not be able to operate independently for much longer. What happens when the federal government, the glue that holds the states together, falls into a faulty relationship and has to question its very existence?
Programs are going to be cut, funding to states lessened, and our dreams shattered, since all of history shows us the lawmakers will protect themselves and their interests first, and be concerned about the general welfare of the population at a later point. NASA, the ultimate embodiment of American frontierism, is already on the chopping block, with massive budget cuts and restrictions likely coming down the pipe - despite being a crucial part of our future, both in terms of space exploration and technological innovation.
And it will likely be a vicious cycle. Funding cuts results in less interest and progress, creating less gains in a given area, which, in turn, will result in more funding cuts.
However, money and intellectualism are not the only worries.
Religion
Religion is not an inherently bad concept, since it helps group people together (an evolutionary survival tactic) and gives hope/relief in some situations. But it can be a devastating force, as the Dark Ages have shown us.
For a time, it appeared that religion had peaked and was on the way out - as the previous century progressed, people became more concerned with themselves, rationality, and society than with the metaphysical. TIME Magazine even ran a feature on "the death of religion". Sadly, that period has passed, giving way to a recent resurgence in religion.
Christian, Muslim, Hindu... the classification and specifics are irrelevant, the important point is that religion can get in the way of intellectual pursuits, and, when encouraged, can eclipse it. As the need for political correctness grew through the last few decades, religious tolerance took on an extreme definition, where the mere criticism of religion was not allowed - even when the religious were allowed to criticize non-believers or those of competing faiths.
This has led us to our current situation where whole states, not just individuals, are attempting to pass off their beliefs as science, contradicting fact and solid theory with creation stories and a "we have a right to believe what we want" mentality. We've seen where this road leads before, and it needs to be stopped.
The Dark Ages was a period of extreme Christianity, and it discounted all but the most basic of scientific tenets. Islam has gone through such a period a few times in their own history, and has resulted in such extremes in portions of the modern Middle East - one needs only to examine the ideals of any Muslim-oriented extremist organization to discover this.
Islam and Christianity both laud values of selflessness and a number of other likable human qualities, but can quickly eschew their own value sets for extremist actions. Religion has a place, and that place is outside of politics, outside of science, and outside of a learning environment - especially for highly impressionable children.
Unless something changes, the Evangelical Christians, and other such high intensity believers, will win their war thanks to political correctness and an aversion to criticize another's beliefs. Their winning this war is not going to result in a good situation for any other than the ignorant, as science will quickly become pseudo-science where the "theory" ("we made it up") of Creationism sits alongside the theory ("we just don't want to call it fact yet") of Evolution. It will eventually bleed into politics and government, turning our mostly-agnostic government into a full blown theocracy.
Does this sound beneficial to our future? A future that is going to be science dependent? No. And any concessions to the hardcore religious, of any type, in a scientific, political, or government arena will ultimately be just one more step towards our imminent doom.
Division
The final major issue contributing to the decimation of our future is the gross divisions appearing in our country on a geographical basis. The reasons behind the divisions run the gamut from politics to religion to race, but the results are clear.
America has long had internal strife and division visible in specific locations, and as one crisis follows another, they are quickly reappearing. Even though the Civil War ended, much of the South has harbored feelings otherwise, and the concerns, interests, and divisions are strikingly similar to the ones Abraham Lincoln had to address.
We have successfully elected America's first black President, Barack Obama, much to the horror of the Southern states. The predominant Republican stronghold exists in the South, which was stringently anti-Obama... and has refused to let it go, continuing to attack with nonsense items, and encourage extremist behaviors, even violence.
And yet other portions of the country, like the West and the Northeast, are strongly Democrat and polar opposite to the Republicans on most issues. Only the Midwest isn't strongly in favor of one side or another, and merely from political party associations, lines can be drawn to divide the country into four distinct sections.
Now consider where the majority of the vocal Christians reside, along with the battle against Creationism, and a host of other issues. A unified country after 9/11 has quickly become an association of entities that are strikingly different, only a few years later, where many residents of one location do not like those from another, let alone want to exchange and discuss ideas in a civil and rational manner.
America is supposed to be a country grounded in freedoms and intelligence, but these divisions are working against us. Just as important as the other major issues, America needs to stay unified in order to not devolve into lesser, poorer states ... the former U.S.S.R. was an abject lesson in deunification.
Conclusion
The conclusion is this: America is facing a host of crushing issues, all of which have to be navigated carefully, appropriately, and properly in order for us to not only continue to exist as a free-thinking, independent, and powerful society, but to have a future at all for the younger generations that is not bleak and depressing.
President Obama, I believe, is intelligent enough to recognize this, and has already mentioned a few of these issues in terms of our future. But it will take more than the polices and appointments of our current President to do what needs to be done: corporations need to act appropriately; government needs to work for and with the people, instead of for the highest bidder; science needs to be once again emphasized and encouraged as the predominant, rational method of thinking.
I've made my case, America. Now step up.
Kyle can be found on Twitter and MySpace, or reached via email.
