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.
