Editor’s Note: This mail bag post is in response to the Voice of the Pride topic posted Feb. 4 about the most important news event in one’s lifetime.
In 1993, I was eight years old. I was in third grade, (and) living with my parents in San Antonio. I was focused on things like after school cartoons, whether or not there would be pizza for dinner on Friday and the afternoon game of tag at recess.
I was not aware that a tectonic shift in the culture of our country was about to reach its zenith, and for the first time since World War II, our country was shifting focus and direction from a nation of innovators, to a nation of merchants.
The best measure of the future advance of a society is not GDP growth, unemployment rate or spending on the military or social welfare programs or how low it has been able to cut tax rates. It is the amount of its treasure that is invested in the future. These investments can take many forms. Infrastructure. Education. Sacrificing current economic gains so that the environment may remain in a livable state for future generations.Development of the engineering disciplines to allow for the deployment of new phenomena and science to discover the phenomena that drive our society forward.
In the depths of World War II, this country found its first passion for science. It was a science project funded at absolutely unheard of levels that, more than any single military operation or great sacrifice of life, ultimately won the war. And the product of that science project was a competition between two nations that, for all its deleterious effect had at least one, glorious product: The National Defense Education Act, signed into law by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
An entire generation of brilliant minds were ushered into the science and engineering disciplines and drawn away from less future-focused pursuits. This effort came alongside many others, including the largest public works project in the history of humanity: the Interstate Highway System. The NDEA kicked off a period of 40 years wherein, regardless of our economic state, generation after generation chose to invest in the future growth of our society, rather than themselves.
In the 1970s the seeds of a change in this attitude were planted. The miraculous Apollo program was cancelled in only its first act, denying our nation a persistent manned presence in the solar system outside of our cradle. Former President Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of spending on this program, liberally sewing our national treasure in areas of directed energy and military research and development. Large experimental projects that would enable us to build the next generation of energy technologies were undertaken, even as the ability to fund them was decimated by a series of tax cuts.
But even as Reagan and his successor former President George H. W. Bush ushered more funding into the sciences, the cultural shift gained momentum and reached, finally, the inflection point I mentioned above: a science project unlike any other in history, which would usher in an advance order of magnitude, advance in our capability was terminated by congress in favor of a symbol of international cooperation. The Superconducting Supercollider, to be built in my very own home state of Texas, was crushed by opposition not because of budgetary constraints or because of political opposition to science, but because it was simply too hard to do.
Physicists who led the project mismanaged it, and congress allowed the mismanagement to become a groundswell. Then, in consultation with former President Bill Clinton, the decision was made. Our nation’s leaders stood in the face of a future filled with the limitless possibility of an advancing society and said in one firm voice, “No thanks, we like what we’ve got.” Rather than taking leadership and fixing a troubled, if vital, project, the community of leaders in our society mutually consented to quit and move onto other, more pleasurable, less rigorous pursuits.
Only in the last few years has a similar device even been attempted — the Large Hadron Collider, which regularly is a part of international news. Its location — France and Switzerland — surely chafes the nationalist in every American. But the key shortcoming isn’t geographic: The LHC has less than one fifth the power of the SSC to probe the basic structure of the universe and give insights into the fundamental forces that will power the future society we hope to build.
It was at this moment, with the cancellation of the SSC, that the 40-year-old tide of advance — not just in science, but in all areas of society — was reversed. And the first generation since those that fought World War II to stand up and say, “No, we will invest first in our own lives” stood proudly holding the hangman’s rope. The same generation today that is defunding NASA, cancelling vital environmental regulations, allowing our infrastructure to languish and die on the vine and stepping quickly and certainly away from our commitment to educate the next generation.
Many will point to Sept. 11 or the end of the Cold War as the most significant news events of their life. I don’t for one second diminish their importance or the magnitude of their tragedy — for a human loss will always be greater than an intellectual one. But when observing the currents of society, none of those events come close to reflecting, in terms of future impact, the massive shift in our society’s focus: from selflessness to selfishness, from the future to the present, from advance to stagnation that is represented by the cancellation of the SSC.
So I can imagine my 8-year-old self on the day Clinton signed the SSC’s death certificate into law playing a game of spaceships and aliens with my friends. It never would have occurred to me that my country would have no interest in making the future I dreamed of possible.
— Tristan Walker, physics junior
