The American Dream, R.I.P.

The reason we won't stand up to big business, big oil, and the Republican party is because we still buy into the Horatio Alger myth: Work hard. Get rich. Except we all want to skip the hard work part. To quote our whining President, "It's hard!" The thing of it is if you get rich today it's either a fluke or you ought to be in jail. What we and most of the people coming across the border fail to realize is that we've killed the American Dream and we've shipped the body to China.

We've left responsibility and innovation behind. We've moved into legislating an "even playing field." The days when America saw another country kicking our butts in some area (e.g., the Russian space program) and said, Oh, hell no! We are not going to let this stand, are gone. We've stopped holding ourselves up to a higher standard in almost every area. There was a time when if the U.S. saw the Japanese making better cars at better prices (even after importing them!) we would have leapt to our feet in protest and insisted on making an even better product. But no. What we do nowadays is go crying to the Government asking them to raise tariffs and otherwise create roadblocks for foreign competition. We have the ability to produce vehicles getting a hundred miles to the gallon; we have the ability to make cars that run on fuels other than gasoline and in much smaller quantities. We have these abilities, but we don't exercise them because we believe it will affect short term profits. Because for some reason we feel we shouldn't have to.

There's a series of commercials out now for Ford Motor Company. They did a big "car switch" with people hoping to get them to like their cars. They probably picked people with old cars and swapped them with brand new ones. Of course it's going to be an improvement. But the key point of the ad is that they didn't tell anyone they were from Ford, they said it was market research. It's pretty sad when American car companies have to resort to deception to get folks to try their cars! And I'll tell you something else—they probably had to lie. I had a Ford Fusion as a rental not too long ago and it was a piece of crap. I will say that it got pretty good mileage—a little more than 30mpg. But that's not enough. It was clunky, uncomfortable, and simply not ergonomic. I hated it. If you told me you were going to swap my car for a Ford Fusion for a week, I'd run the other direction. I'd stick with my bicycle for the week, thank you very much.

If anyone or anything is unpatriotic or guilty of treason it is not the group questioning these things. If anything it is time to fire up the anti-American activities committee and set them loose on Detroit, the oil industry, and, frankly, our own Government. If there is one thing that can be pointed to as the biggest threat to American security, it's our own dependence on foreign oil (don't get me started on education!). By refusing to do anything but foster this dependence when the technology is there to eliminate this dependence right now, these groups are committing the highest form of treason. It's time to put a few heads on the block and change our direction.