TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

This Time, The Crisis Brings No Surprises

ADVERTISEMENT

By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 7, 2008

For another generation, today's date brings up many of the same emotions as Sept. 11 does to this one.

Talk to members of what sometimes is called "the greatest generation" and you find there was that same feeling of wonder and shock that a country many were only vaguely aware of could have perpetrated such a vile act.

This Dec. 7 finds us in a crisis of another kind, but one that seems to have been as much of a surprise to some people as that morning the Japanese flew into Pearl Harbor.

Government officials, as usual, claimed to be more surprised than the rest of us. This week they announced we are in a recession, something the rest of us have known for about a year.

This time the shock of seeing things falling apart has been more gradual, building like an incoming tide of bad news.

Maybe it's because now that things are getting dicey we are paying more attention to what politicians and corporate managers are doing. Watching the auto industry CEOs in Washington last week was especially fascinating.

Pass The Buck - Yours

The three of them sitting there getting grilled by politicians who at the same time knew we were watching them on TV was a little eerie. I suspect it didn't take long for most viewers to realize that none of them really seemed to know what needed to be done other than shore themselves up with more of your money.

Watching the auto executives, I wondered if any of them had ever been to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Other than getting mugged, there just isn't that much else to do in Detroit.

Greenfield Village is in Dearborn, on the outskirts of Detroit next to the big Ford complex. It is one of America's great storehouses. It originally was called the Edison Institute and put together on roughly 250 acres by Henry Ford as a place to show off everything that made America great.

One Last Gasp

It's a little quirky. There is a test tube that allegedly contains Edison's last breath. How they figured that I don't know but I have this image of someone leaning over the great inventor, waiting for one more gasp.

But the place does have a staggering collection of 19th and early 20th century stuff, including the Wright brothers' bicycle shop, Edison's laboratory, and a collection of machinery and technology that took us from the 19th into the 20th century.

There are cars and boats but what you need to see are the giant steam locomotives. One of the engines, the great "Allegheny" built to carry coal over the West Virginia mountains, is so massive you are humbled standing next to it.

You meander through the village and the museum and see the inventions and work of George Washington Carver, John Deere, Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell and the like and you are reminded of a time when we made things instead of outsourcing them.

It probably wouldn't hurt all of us to take a few steps back in time and remember just where it is we came from and what it was that made America what it is.

Most Americans are painfully unaware of their heritage. We certainly don't emphasize it in school anymore. That's part of the tragedy of today, as young people looking for jobs and a sense of place don't know what we've been and could be again.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT