As with most things I contemplate, it seems my options are bifurcated. If I were to following my undergraduate education into a profession as an engineer, I would have multiple options. I could work for a variety of companies doing a variety of things. However, a career in engineering can't fulfill my needs. This is continually proven in my discussions with many friends who have graduated and are currently working for some of the most prestigious companies in their respective fields. Their apathy for most things in the world, while not all-encompassing of their kind, frightens me. The best engineers I know live for the project.
While it is a necessary profession, the days of the lone engineering creating an invention
that changes the world has passed. Such results are only achieved after years of struggle by the brightest of us, as the recent NASA Phoenix project has shown us.
Where does power lie within our country? The government holds most of it, through a legal system. Some might argue that power is held by individuals or corporations. Still, these smaller units exercise their power under the umbrella of the law. If you believe people hold the power, it should be understood that people are able to exercise it because our government acknowledges it. I don't advocate for this system, I just understand that it is in place simply by looking at nations with authoritarian governments within which individual rights are second to society's stability or just ignored.
Any path in life requires power, of some level. At the highest levels, power can be bartered and brokered like the Jell-o Pudding at a middle school lunch table. Simply rejecting the system gets nothing accomplished. If you want to affect change, you can either reform the system or destroy it. Since my revolutionary lunchtime actions culminated in a fiberglass-cast battle where I successfully parried lunch bag attacks, I eventually became a reformer. My power expanded greatly during the coming years, discovering the high value of turkey sandwiches and packages fruit drinks.
As I prepare to graduate college, I realize that bartering favors, food, and drinks no longer provides the power that I need to change anything. Law provides that next step to power, an education that allows me to open the gates of government. Even if I choose not pursue a life of change, understanding the system is necessary still if I want to act inside of it, to live a life of comfort with the power to do so. If change is my goal, then the avenue to powerful change is accessible.
It is those two paths, power for change or power for maintenance, that lie before me. The former offers a long, difficult path without great comforts and continuous failure by commonly accepted definitions of success. The latter requires flexible morals or the subsuming of them to achieve similar power much faster, yet constrained by the dictates of those that grant that power to a much greater degree.
At an idealistic age, I don't have much to lose materially. However, there is much I can gain. The idealistic choice comes at a great economic cost. In the same logic, the more pragmatic choice bears its own cost as well - that of my morals. What is of greater value - a six-figure salary or maintaining my morality?
I have the next three years to see if I can rationalize either view to the point of embracing one in a career upon yet another graduation. The generation that inspired and were in return inspired by the speech of a harmonious dream upon the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the first steps of humanity on ground besides that of Earth, the first steps of women into social equality, and the first day celebrating the Earth's nature now let slip the very same ideals at the core of those events. Of all the amazing things that have been accomplished within their lives, can we hope to accomplish the same? Should we expect to lose the same gains? Have those who have come before us failed or succeed?
John F. Kennedy's 1960 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech (available both in text and audio) still applies almost 50 years later, with governmental regimes collapsed and discarded, technology advanced beyond comprehension, and social constraints cut more deeply into than ever before. The following is the last half of his speech:
But I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high--to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.
Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.
Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. There are new and more terrible weapons--new and uncertain nations--new pressures of population and deprivation. One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free- -but one-third is the victim of cruel repression--and the other one- third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.
Meanwhile, Communist influence has penetrated further into Asia, stood astride the Middle East and now festers some ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Friends have slipped into neutrality--and neutrals into hostility. As our keynoter reminded us, the President who began his career by going to Korea ends it by staying away from Japan.
The world has been close to war before--but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.
Here at home, the changing face of the future is equally revolutionary. The New Deal and the Fair Deal were bold measures for their generations--but this is a new generation.
A technological revolution on the farm has led to an output explosion--but we have not yet learned to harness that explosion usefully, while protecting our farmers' right to full parity income.
An urban population explosion has overcrowded our schools, cluttered up our suburbs, and increased the squalor of our slums.
A peaceful revolution for human rights--demanding an end to racial discrimination in all parts of our community life--has strained at the leashes imposed by timid executive leadership.
A medical revolution has extended the life of our elder citizens without providing the dignity and security those later years deserve. And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.
There has also been a change--a slippage--in our intellectual and moral strength. Seven lean years of drouth and famine have withered a field of ideas. Blight has descended on our regulatory agencies--and a dry rot, beginning in Washington, is seeping into every corner of America--in the payola mentality, the expense account way of life, the confusion between what is legal and what is right. Too many Americans have lost their way, their will and their sense of historic purpose.
It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership--new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities.
All over the world, particularly in the newer nations, young men are coming to power--men who are not bound by the traditions of the past--men who are not blinded by the old fears and hates and rivalries-- young men who can cast off the old slogans and delusions and suspicions.
The Republican nominee-to-be, of course, is also a young man. But his approach is as old as McKinley. His party is the party of the past. His speeches are generalities from Poor Richard's Almanac. Their platform, made up of left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo--and today there can be no status quo.
For I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not "every man for himself"--but "all for the common cause." They were determined to make that new world strong and free, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from without and within.
Today some would say that those struggles are all over--that all the horizons have been explored--that all the battles have been won-- that there is no longer an American frontier.
But I trust that no one in this vast assemblage will agree with those sentiments.
For the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won--and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier--the frontier of the 1960's--a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils-- a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.
Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises--it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook--it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.
But I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. It would be easier to shrink back from that frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric--and those who prefer that course should not cast their votes for me, regardless of party.
But I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age--to all who respond to the Scriptural call: "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed."
For courage--not complacency--is our need today--leadership--not salesmanship. And the only valid test of leadership is the ability to lead, and lead vigorously. A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is a Tory nation--and the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory.
There may be those who wish to hear more--more promises to this group or that--more harsh rhetoric about the men in the Kremlin--more assurances of a golden future, where taxes are always low and subsidies ever high. But my promises are in the platform you have adopted--our ends will not be won by rhetoric and we can have faith in the future only if we have faith in ourselves.
For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning-point in history. We must prove all over again whether this nation--or any nation so conceived--can long endure--whether our society--with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives--can compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.
Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure? That is the real question. Have we the nerve and the will? Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction--but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men's minds?
Are we up to the task--are we equal to the challenge? Are we willing to match the Russian sacrifice of the present for the future--or must we sacrifice our future in order to enjoy the present?
That is the question of the New Frontier. That is the choice our nation must make--a choice that lies not merely between two men or two parties, but between the public interest and private comfort--between national greatness and national decline--between the fresh air of progress and the stale, dank atmosphere of "normalcy"--between determined dedication and creeping mediocrity.
All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world looks to see what we will do. We cannot fail their trust, we cannot fail to try.
It has been a long road from that first snowy day in New Hampshire to this crowded convention city. Now begins another long journey, taking me into your cities and homes all over America. Give me your help, your hand, your voice, your vote. Recall with me the words of Isaiah: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary."
As we face the coming challenge, we too, shall wait upon the Lord, and ask that he renew our strength. Then shall we be equal to the test. Then we shall not be weary. And then we shall prevail.
Thank you.
