Perspectives on losing our edge

The 'columnist preacher' Friedman goes ballistic this week on the 'dumbing down of America' theme...

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

Meanwhile some of what he says makes sense - we go about cutting each other lawns, rubbing each others back after taking courses in massage therapy and learn to trim each others hair on select areas of our anatomy - yes, we are a now a true service economy in every sense of the word, but at what cost. A cost that might involve telling our children that opting to cut someone else's lawn or fashion someone else's hair or massage someone else's back is the best that they could hope to make of their lives growing up in America...

This little story in the Times today about a automobile employee who was laid off recently and decided to go to massage therapy classes to make up the money sums it all up nicely.

More than 1,000 workers were laid off at the Moraine plant. Under terms of the U.A.W. contract for all its members, they and the workers in Janesville and Newark will collect unemployment checks and payments from G.M. that together equal about 80 percent of their take-home pay. But those payments will only last about a year. And with the U.A.W. prepared to suspend its “jobs bank” program as a condition of the federal loans, there will be no safety net after that.
Some workers will have an opportunity to transfer to other plants. But with the industry contracting so quickly, there is little job security in making a move. “I can’t risk transferring,” said David Williams, one of the remaining 1,100 workers at the Newark plant when it closed. “I don’t want to go 1,200 miles away to get laid off again.” Mr. Williams installed a sunroof on the last Dodge Durango to come down the assembly line in Newark. Now he plans to take massage-therapy classes and pursue a new career far from the factory floor. “Enough with the concrete,” he said. “It’s time for some carpet and climate control.”