175 – “What price success?”

IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE
By Hetty Gray

# 175

January 17, 2014

“What price success?”

We all value success, be it among personal matters or in the workplace, but there is a price involved in both.

Looking back a little more than 150 years, we see an America on the brink of both discovery and innovation. Natural resources fueled an explosion of manufacturing and expansion in the business community.

I doubt if that could even occur today. The very idea of blasting through mountains to carve out roads and tunnels would, no doubt, endanger some little creature and environmentalists would stop the process in its tracks. God forbid a new oil field discovered anywhere in the lower 48 — and if you doubt that, ask Alaskans what they think!

Vault through the decades from the 1880s to the 1980s and what do you find? Millions of dollars change hands without a single tangible product in sight. The millionaires and billionaires of the technology age came away with lots of dollars, but they merely found new ways of informing and entertaining their customers.

Where the country once boasted rolling steel mills and huge factories producing what economists deem “durable goods,” now all we see in our huge ports are cranes unloading items made abroad.

Anyone who deals in hardware can tell you about the poor quality nuts and bolts China churns out. In less than heartbeat of history, we have moved from “Made in America” to made everywhere else you can imagine. Never mind they pirate and steal anything they can get their hands on and hack into our computer systems with glee.

Call centers dot the globe and, bless their hearts, many of the technicians on the other end of the phone have a hard time speaking English, let alone understanding it.

Quality and quantity once went hand in hand in this country. We set the standard for the world. Now, we have given over the reins to others and go our merry way with technology at the helm. A fat lot of help technology will be if we really need to make things.

For example, today no factories on American soil produce items critical to the electrical grid. Should we suffer damage from a solar flare or an Electro-Magnetic Pulse attack, we will find ourselves plummeted back to the 19th century in seconds.

Since so few of us can conjure up how to do anything manually, this kind of catastrophe will trigger riots and chaos from coast to coast. People laugh at the “dooms dayers” who store up food and prepare to exist solely on their own talents, but maybe they are the ones to laugh.

Just how capable are you of living without electricity, running water, heat or cooling. And what of food? Ever raised it? Ever had even a small garden? As the old saying goes, “Don’t laugh at the farmer with a mouth full.”

Despite being linked by computers, email, cell phones and all sorts of broadcast media, we are completely unhinged when it comes to knowing the basics of getting along on our own.

It is about time we took a really hard look at just what we don’t manufacture in America. We need to be able to step up to the plate and make critical items here at home. Oh, sure, things made in China or other far-flung places may be cheaper, but quality is poor. So they are cheap, but at what cost? Sadly, that cost may be our very lives.

I have claimed for years that we are feeding the tiger that will devour us, and it is becoming more and more of a reality. When you throw in currency manipulation and the ridiculous trade imbalance. It may be free trade, but it is far from fair.

So now we are at a critical crossroads and we need to rediscover American innovation — once the envy of the entire world. After all, when was the last time you heard of someone “making it big” by actually inventing something? A while, huh?

We need to give our kids more than computers in classrooms. All that high-end stuff is fine, but in case of widespread power outages, it is useless. Without electricity, students can still read a textbook. Light still streams into windows of schools —that is, if the buildings actually have windows. Minds continue to function without the use of laptops and tablets.

We rely much too heavily on machines and forget to value the pure mesh of the human mind and the human hand.

Revitalize “Made in America.” The only way to make a change is at the cash register. I hope people begin to demand goods made here — especially durable goods. A groundswell can work a miracle. In truth, a miracle is precisely what the nation needs. Are you willing to move toward a self-sufficient America? Think about it.

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