Money over Morality

I am still trying to understand what happened to America. And can't help but notice most Americans are not doing this - and seem to feel that not understanding is better than understanding.

I can remember when I went to High School - and everyone was interested in two things: Athletics and Money. The two were firmly fused in their minds. Nothing else mattered. And one other thing - to not think about this basic harmony - the same harmony that made the Planets rotate about the Sun.

I wasn't too sure about this, but I could see one thing: I had to have a career that made money. How it made money was not important - and it was best to not think about that.

So I became an Electronic Engineer, specializing in the newest Radars, built to detect incoming Soviet bombers (that never existed). Huge amounts of money were spent on these monster radars, and a little of that money, went into my pockets.

Everyone thought this was perfectly normal - but in fact, it exhausted the economies of the USSR, and the US. Everyone thought in terms of the enemy - and not in terms of themselves.

We had the finest economy in the history of the world - but ended up with something not so fine. And could not understand why. I think this was the question at the bottom of American minds, in the unconscious part of their minds "What happened to us?"

They could not understand, that they had wasted their money - so much money, that their economy could not recover. And not only that - lost their morality, and could not recover that either.

This was America, at the end of the Seventies. I remember it well, because my career as an Electronic Engineer ended also - when Vacuum Tubes were replaced with Solid State devices. And all the money went into Computers instead.

Americans could not understand this either - the factories that produced most of the world's goods, in the Industrial Midwest, in the Fifties, went out of business. These empty factories still exist - monuments to a past that no longer exists.

They have lost the most important thing of all - their minds.