By Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpts:
We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.
Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?
... California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.
Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.
America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years ...
Go. Read the whole thing.
Personal observation: I don't blame the entire population of the USA. We have many, many people who would happily participate in megaprojects.
I blame the unprecedented, explosive growth of faceless bureaucracies and the bureacrats who do nothing except to compose ever-more rules and regulations which accomplish nothing, but prohibit much.
You know the definition of a "bureaucrat", don't you?
bureaucrat - an anonymous class of paper pushers who lie awake at night, in sleepless dread that someone, somewhere, might be doing something without permission.
10 comments:
Great find
I'm glad you liked it.
...And they did it all largely BY HAND! Funny; I was just thinking about this very thing yesterday. I told this to someone at work, who said HE had just been thinking of it as well. ...Holy Spirit stirring?...
And Trump is doing his best to eliminate those restraints on our economy.
God bless him.
Entirely possible, sir. Maybe even likely.
Yes, he is. May the Lord strengthen his hands.
I have found Victor Davis Hanson to be a voice of reason in this increasingly insane world of ours. Thanks for the link.
You’re very welcome, ma’am.
Good article, Reverend. It is true: I think the great projects of the pas really are behind us. Yes, we may continue to have advances in computers and medicine, but they will be all for naught if we cannot do the simple thing of feeding ourselves and moving that food between places.
It reminds me of Tolkien's world, where there were structures build by the Men of Numenor that the Middle Earth of that time could not replicate. We - or some part of we - will end up savages living in the ruins, done in not by war or plague but by our our simple inability to sustain our standard of living because we could not maintain it.
I find that entirely possible, TB. With less and less education provided to fewer and fewer people, collapse of infrastructure would be inevitable.
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