My life spans the period of time he talks about in his op-ed piece of February 20. My emotional immaturity as a teenager led to a very untimely pregnancy while still in high school. Yes, I know it is quite common today, but not at that time.
Thanks to an evening school training program by Grumman Aircraft, I became a machinist while earning my degree at Hofstra evening school. I bought a house at nineteen and had three children by the time I was twenty-one. Try doing that today.
Thanks to our post-WWII manufacturing economy, I was able to survive and eventually prosper. I think often today about the reality that I would not be able to do what I did then in today's America.
My big disappointment today is that there has not been a clear call to action by the Obama administration. In my opinion, the first priority should have been a call to public service program for our young people starting out in life and to our seniors at the end of life.
Why weren't the young people who were significant in Obama's election called to some type of mandatory public service? Is that too radical?
My senior career (I will die while living and never retire) as you know is in the field of urban horticulture, which I prefer to call urban greenscaping. This is a fertile field for new business and new jobs but we have inadequate leadership.
Retrogressive public institutions that teach naive young foodies and dirt farmer wanabees methods that are long outdated in the modern urban world dominate the public conversation. In my view this is a national failure.
What we need in the city are urban food producers who are technologists rather than dirt farmers. Dirt farmers, do what they do best in the country where there is an ample supply of dirt. Here in the city, land is scarce and very often unsafe for food growing. Soil contamination is quite common and often an unrecognized hazard to health.
Modern sub-irrigation planters (SIPs), hydroponics, aeroponics and aquaponics are far better solutions for local food production in the city. There are many good efforts going on in this field, but not nearly enough. Those talking dirt unfortunately dominate the conversation.
We don’t need more low paying service jobs in the city. We desperately need manufacturing and technology-based jobs that offer the opportunity for a traditional but sustainable American life not solely based on consumerism. Widespread use of modern food production technology will lead to new small businesses and new jobs with decent pay.
It would also make good business sense for partnerships to form between urban food technologists and rural farmers. We need creative and holistic solutions rather than partisan partitioning which is so often the case in our current society. This would be a great program for the new leaders of the USDA under the Obama administration. I'm not convinced they're listening.
The Fat Lady Has Sung - NYTimes.com
Welcome to the lean years.
Yes, sir, we’ve just had our 70 fat years in America, thanks to the Greatest Generation and the bounty of freedom and prosperity they built for us. And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.
Let’s just hope our lean years will only number seven. That will depend a lot on us and whether we rise to the economic challenges of this moment. Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.
The USDA Extension Program and our botanic gardens became "grasshopper" havens back in the '70s when I made my mid-life career change. I know these grasshoppers well, they were my classmates.
The Cal Poly campus was teeming with anti-technology, counter culture kids who
were looking to avoid the harsh world of business. There was a one year
wait to get into the schools of horticulture, landscape architecture
and forestry. Many of my young classmates are now tenured professors and
shelf sitters in our land grant institutions and the extension program.
Mr. Obama won the election because he was able to “rent” a significant number of independent voters — including Republican business types who had never voted for a Democrat in their lives — because they knew in their guts that the country was on the wrong track and was desperately in need of nation-building at home and that John McCain was not the man to do it.
I am one to those he "rented", but as we know renters can readily move.
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