Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
Humankind is a few million years old.
For most of that time, people hunted and gathered.
Agriculture is about 10,000 years old,
and for all but the last two or three hundred years,
has been fueled by muscle power: man and beast.
When humans learned how to substitute steam for muscle,
first by burning coal, and later other fossil fuels,
this nation was just being settled. The industrial revolution
happened just as we spread out on this rich continent,
and soon our tractors and combines made us rich.
Making tractors and combines and cars and trains,
making steel and machinery made us rich, too.
We rode both the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
During all that time, we sang the praises of competition;
good, old Yankee competition! "You can be anything!",
we said. "Use your head, work hard, be smarter,
and you will become rich!" We all wanted to become rich.
We pretended we were all becoming rich. We weren't.
Some became very rich. Filthy rich. Competition worked!
We ignored the fact that in a system of winners and losers,
while some are winning, others are losing. But losing,
for us, wasn't so bad, because we had a gloriously rich continent,
and even the losers did pretty well. We could afford to
have public schools for everybody's kids, and tell the fire
department to put out everybody's fires. We put money
aside for old age pensions, and social security. We had
a lot of money in the system. There was still land to farm,
and minerals to dig up, and machinery to build and sell!
What we are living through, in our own lifetimes,
is the transfer of agriculture and industry to those locations
where there is abundant rich land, and where industry
has not yet had a chance to utilize the labor of all those
muscle-powered farmers to come work in the factory.
I grew up milking cows by hand, and driving horses.
In middle age, I moved to Chicago and saw the orange sky
over Gary, Indiana steel mills. It was scarcely yesterday
that "Detroit" meant automobiles by the millions.
All that stuff is moving to other places, leaving parts behind.
Our unemployed are people who used to work in industry,
and manage and sell what industries made. The industry
is gone: the people remain, unemployed, unemployable.
There is more! The next step is post-industrial, information-
based, dependent on science, and new forms of energy.
What do we need to become really good at that?
Schools! The best educated population ever! The best
scientists available from anywhere in the world. We need
energy, not just from coal and oil, but energy sources
that will not themselves destroy us and our environment.
We need a rebuilt infrastructure: transportation, utilities,
ways to deliver information massively and instantly.
We need a healthy population, a secure one; one that
both participates in, but benefits from what needs to be done.
We hid the ugly side of what we praised as "competition",
because there was always more land, and more oil.
We need cooperation, a sense of being in this together,
benefiting together. We need to pour money into our schools,
our health, our communities. And most of all, we need
someone to speak to us of what all this means, to make it clear
what is happening, and what needs to happen.
Things do move fast. I can still feel what it meant to hold
the leather reins in my hands, and talk to the team of horses.
Scarcely a scrap of that leather remains. Detroit scarcely remains.
We need clarity.
Humankind is a few million years old.
For most of that time, people hunted and gathered.
Agriculture is about 10,000 years old,
and for all but the last two or three hundred years,
has been fueled by muscle power: man and beast.
When humans learned how to substitute steam for muscle,
first by burning coal, and later other fossil fuels,
this nation was just being settled. The industrial revolution
happened just as we spread out on this rich continent,
and soon our tractors and combines made us rich.
Making tractors and combines and cars and trains,
making steel and machinery made us rich, too.
We rode both the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
During all that time, we sang the praises of competition;
good, old Yankee competition! "You can be anything!",
we said. "Use your head, work hard, be smarter,
and you will become rich!" We all wanted to become rich.
We pretended we were all becoming rich. We weren't.
Some became very rich. Filthy rich. Competition worked!
We ignored the fact that in a system of winners and losers,
while some are winning, others are losing. But losing,
for us, wasn't so bad, because we had a gloriously rich continent,
and even the losers did pretty well. We could afford to
have public schools for everybody's kids, and tell the fire
department to put out everybody's fires. We put money
aside for old age pensions, and social security. We had
a lot of money in the system. There was still land to farm,
and minerals to dig up, and machinery to build and sell!
What we are living through, in our own lifetimes,
is the transfer of agriculture and industry to those locations
where there is abundant rich land, and where industry
has not yet had a chance to utilize the labor of all those
muscle-powered farmers to come work in the factory.
I grew up milking cows by hand, and driving horses.
In middle age, I moved to Chicago and saw the orange sky
over Gary, Indiana steel mills. It was scarcely yesterday
that "Detroit" meant automobiles by the millions.
All that stuff is moving to other places, leaving parts behind.
Our unemployed are people who used to work in industry,
and manage and sell what industries made. The industry
is gone: the people remain, unemployed, unemployable.
There is more! The next step is post-industrial, information-
based, dependent on science, and new forms of energy.
What do we need to become really good at that?
Schools! The best educated population ever! The best
scientists available from anywhere in the world. We need
energy, not just from coal and oil, but energy sources
that will not themselves destroy us and our environment.
We need a rebuilt infrastructure: transportation, utilities,
ways to deliver information massively and instantly.
We need a healthy population, a secure one; one that
both participates in, but benefits from what needs to be done.
We hid the ugly side of what we praised as "competition",
because there was always more land, and more oil.
We need cooperation, a sense of being in this together,
benefiting together. We need to pour money into our schools,
our health, our communities. And most of all, we need
someone to speak to us of what all this means, to make it clear
what is happening, and what needs to happen.
Things do move fast. I can still feel what it meant to hold
the leather reins in my hands, and talk to the team of horses.
Scarcely a scrap of that leather remains. Detroit scarcely remains.
We need clarity.
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