My dentist, Julianna, tells me that she and her husband saw Barack Obama speak here, at the high school auditorium early in 2007. They were both impressed by Obama's pitch for college students to quit focusing on business courses and to study the harder sciences - engineering, math, physics, chemistry, instead. Julianna's husband, the bag-piper, works for Motorola, and (as best I recall Julianna's telling) Motorola can't find enough American-born engineers to fill their staffing needs.
I strenuously disagree with the premise. This country's educational programs need to produce more poets, more artists, more mimes, more theologians, more comics, more story-tellers, more historians, more teachers, more philosophers, more statesmen, more public servants, more musicians, more mystics, more heretics, more healers, more listeners, more critical thinkers, more writers, yes, even more informed bloggers.
My country wages destructive, preemptvie, illegal, immoral wars as ruthlessly and viciously as any nation that ever stood. My country asks its most creative scientific minds to envision how it shall wage war 30 years hence. My country's politicians don't think beyond the next election cycle. My country's media elites would have our citizens believe that social justice is a communist plot to keep prayer out of the public schools. My country's financial elites would have us all believe that "the market," the private sector, and "capitalism" can solve the problems of all of mankind, once and for all, until, of course, they can't, at which point, the government must come to the rescue -- the rescue of the richest, that is, at the expense of the poorest.
No. We don't need any more cold, calculating number folks (like I used to be).
We need warm, accepting, human beings who have learned life's most important lessons: that life is not so easy, that we all stumble, that we all fall, that we cannot pull ourselves up all by ourselves, that along the way, there has always been a helping hand, a guiding light, a guardian angel, and that when we finally learn to forgive ourselves, then, and only then, do we learn to forgive others.
