General Jackassery

Several months ago the ASCE at UAH had an alumnus come in and talk about his years as a member of the ASCE and also the company that he started after working for NASA for several years. One of the things that has stuck with me from his talk was the statement he made about other schools and their dislike for UAH. He said something along the lines of, “Other schools hate UAH because we’re so much better than them. They can’t figure out why we keep beating them. They think it’s all given to us but they just don’t get it! They’ll never know why we beat them, they don’t get it!” The reason UAH was so dominant in the past is not because we were any smart or any better. The reason is because we decided that we wanted to win and we out WORKED everyone! If they were sleeping we were working. If it was raining and cold and they didn’t want to practice, we did! The reason we won is because we worked when other schools wouldn’t!

You still don’t get it! Today in America, more and more jobs are headed off shore, more and more AMERICAN companies have CEO’s that are foreign. More and more of the top engineering and science jobs in the U.S. are being taken by foriegners and more and more of these high tech, elite jobs are being done over seas. Why?

Why did the United States win the cold war? Why did we win World War II? Look at the history of our country and the generation that won World War II and was very responsible for winning the Cold War. They were raised with nothing, at the tail end of the great depression our parents and grand parents had nothing. They were running scared and they would do anything to survive. They worked their fingers to the bone to survive and when it came time to unify and fight for a common cause there was no other country in the world with the drive and the willingness to work their collective asses off to win. The United States didn’t win because somebody else lost. The United States won because we as a people worked when others weren’t willing to. We fought like our lives depended on it and they did.

Today, there is no World War II, there is no Cold War and my generation has been given everything. In our eyes everything is great, we have nothing to work for. Our parents have told us that they worked so hard so we wouldn’t have too. They’ve told us that we can be whatever we want to be. So, we take the easy road. We get business degrees because it’s much easier than engineering degrees. We get philosophy degrees because no-one has pushed us to do more than flip hamburgers.

Quietly through all of this, on the other side of the world the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese are working their asses off. They don’t know what it’s like to live in the lap of luxury but they want to. So they study, they use their enormous numbers as a base to create some of the greatest minds the world has ever seen. While they are getting smarter, we are collectively getting dumber! We have no drive, we’re happy with what our parents have given us and we shouldn’t be. We assume it can’t get better than this and that assumption is wrong!

Why are Americans getting fatter everyday? Because we’ve gotten lazy, we’d rather stay at home and play the video games that the Japanese feed us. Our engineering and science base is getting older and we’re not replacing it. And in the mean time we’re loosing ground to the rest of the world.

I’m scared! You should be too!