The state of the union is one of anger. I’m not talking about President Barack Obama’s speech, though there were significant portions of his speech that seemed to come from a place of anger, or at least frustration. I’m talking about the actual conditions the United States is facing today.
We hear a lot about the high level of partisanship in Washington from congressmen and pundits who are positively phototactic. They run to the bright lights of our nation’s television studios and spend more time talking about how the other side prevents them from doing their job than they spend actually doing their jobs. This is why, not only does Congress have the lowest approval ratings in the history of the body, but lower approval ratings than telemarketers, lobbyists and used-car salesmen. The very same members of Congress that bash the gridlock cause the very gridlock they complain about.
But these are not the real issues we are facing. Even the issues that Obama addressed last night, including reinvesting in American energy and American manufacturing, cannot happen until we address the real issue in our country: education. The president touched on this briefly in his speech, but let’s look into the issue further. How can we honestly expect to revolutionise our energy industry when high schools in this country are cutting science and technology programmes? How can we build manufacturing jobs in America when our children no longer have the opportunity to work with their hands in school?
We need to get kids interested in education again. No one can argue that our children don’t need a background in mathematics and English to be successful. But our children also need science and art and technology. Our children need our politicians to recognise what every teacher already knows: American education should be as exceptional and as diverse as America’s citizens.
Today there will be a lot of discussion about how well the president did. You’re not going to see too many stories about the quality of the programmes the president proposed. What the majority of the stories will be about is simple: it will be about how the president’s speech will impact on his re-election campaign. This is not to criticise the media, they can only produce what we are interested in. We have turned politics into sports. National elections are reported as box scores. Unless we are willing to have real conversations about how to improve this country, we will never make the changes we need to improve this country. Obama’s speech won’t be measured on how successful he is at implementing the policies he proposed, but rather on whether he is re-elected.
The paper is blank. The slate is clear. We are the architects of tomorrow. The future our children will face is the future that we will create for them. Republican and Democratic visions for this future are not that different. We all want our children to grow up more successful than the previous generation – to live in a world that is more free and more prosperous. We disagree on how to get there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go forward. After all, this is the nation of Lewis and Clark, of Armstrong and Aldrin, of Edison and Sagan. We are a nation of trailblazers, explorers and dreamers.
The union is angry because, for many Americans, the state of our union needs improving and they have little to no hope that their leaders will take action. We need to get to work, because our future is no longer on the horizon, it is right in front of us.
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