We need to go here
Dreams, as Americans we have always dreamed big. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the canals linking the Great Lakes, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal, the Marshall Plan, the Great Society, and landing men on the Moon in just a little over a decade after we first ventured into space.
By all accounts I should have a flying car and be living in a suburb of a major Martian city. But something happened as I was growing up. Our nation stopped dreaming. Sure we had Skylab, the Space Shuttles, and several unmanned missions into space; however, the big dreams of our nation have stopped. Today we bicker endlessly over what are really distractions that in many ways have very simple solutions. Gun control, debt fights, the sequester, healthcare, unemployment, climate change, and the list goes on and on.
My father always used to tell me that yes, America had made mistakes; however, we were the greatest nation on Earth. I grew up believing that as imperfect as our past was we would always have a bright future. Today, I cannot tell my son that we are the greatest nation, nor can I tell him we have a bright future. Why? We have lost our ability to dream big. As a child I wanted to be one of two things when I grew up, one was an astronaut (NASA, If you are ever looking for a heavyset, balding, middle-aged astronaut, I am your guy).
The second thing I wanted to be was a writer, My father, the always responsible child of the Depression he was, would always come back with you need to get a job, you are wasting your life and your money on all those record albums, why do you want to go to college when you can get a good job now. It wasn’t just my father, there were friends, and relatives who said the same things. After my dad passed away and after having been laid off I decided that I would make myself more marketable and I went back to college. While in college my dad’s voice echoed in the back of my head do something practical. So instead of following my heart and majoring in creative writing and the arts I got a Bachelor’s in information technology. It did not take long to realize after graduation that I was not happy in IT. A few years after graduation I was still dreaming of becoming a writer and I said fuck it and went back to school for myself to get a Masters in writing.
Now, I may never get rich as a writer, I may never make a dime off of my writing; however, I am writing and it makes me happy. A year or so ago when a cousin of mine asked me what I was going to school for and I told her – she recoiled in terror and asked, “What work are you going to get with that degree?” While my response at the time was not very eloquent, what I should have said was, “What difference does it make as long as I am happy doing it.”
Which brings me to the point of this diary. I never stopped dreaming. The dream of being a writer stayed with me even though I had been told multiple times to give it up. Now, we as a nation, have stopped dreaming big. Where are the proposals to end poverty, to go to Mars, to send manned missions to space, and to find alternative clean energy sources? While I cannot say that giving NASA a full budget would end poverty I can say that it would create good jobs and going down the road of space exploration would certainly give us technological innovations that could end our dependence on fossil fuels.
We must not allow private enterprise to monetize space exploration - NASA can do the job and must do the job. It will give us something to dream about, something we can all come together for. I want to be around when NASA lands the first ship on Mars and I want to see the first man or woman make that giant leap for mankind. I want to see the United States of America be all that it can be. All that I thought it once was.
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a much better case for this than I do, jump below the fold to see the two videos that inspired this diary.