Saturday, March 5, 2011

Failure is fast becoming an unpleasant reality

Editorial

By Keith Patrick Steinhurst

SAN ANTONIO 5 Mar. 2011 (ACNS) - Interestingly enough, the only word in standard English usage to have the letters UFA in order, in the word is "manufacture" - we don't do enough of that in our Country any more - in fact (based on the book, "Failure is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz, we could have gone to Mars based on our Apollo technology functioning in 1972, but we lost the will, got into the 'bus' business, lost the infrastructure as well as the engineers to fabricate a program, and no longer even posess a complete set of technical documents for the Saturn V heavy lift launch vehicle. If we started today it would take us more than 20 years just to get back to where we were in '72 - really sad . . .I find it a microcosm of the macrocosm - we are broke, morally, insitutionally, and sytemically - perhaps individually we can effect some small change within our own spheres of influence, but by and large, we are witnessing our national decline . . .

Our grandfather's generation was perhaps the single, most ingenious and prosperous generation in our Nation's history - in the words of my late bishop - the one who ordered me and was himself a member of that generation, a veteran of WWII and Korea - they 'built the machine,' 'understood it,' could 'operate' it, and as needed, 'repair' it - they passed it to the 'boomers' (our father's generation) who neither built it, nor understood it, but could operate it and perhaps fix it. It is now left to us, operating, but in a growing state of disrepair, the design and even the reasons for its creation largely unknown or misunderstood. This is the legacy we leave our children who don't know how to fix it as they do not know what is broken and are content to let it operate on cruise until it breaks as they seem oblivious to the potential danger in failure. This takes us back to Kranz's posit - failure is not an option - but it is fast becoming an unpleasant reality . . .