I whined to a coworker today about how we go to school for the first twenty or so years of our lives being taught to seek truth, question authority, scrutinize and critically analyze. Then, one goes into the workforce and is asked to “fake it.”

It brought to mind a student of mine back when I taught high school. The headmistress admonished us the first day of class that we were educators, and if our students weren’t getting A’s and B’s, we weren’t doing our job. Carrie was in my physics and trig classes. I encouraged her to ask questions and stay after for extra help. She was more than enthusiastic on both counts, but unlike all my other students, she could never score higher than C’s in my classes. Neither of us could see what she wasn’t getting.

I feel like Carrie these days as I am surrounded by weasel words like “synergy,” “energy,” “hope,” “empowerment,” etc. I made my opinion known at work, which earned me a well-intended response that again missed the target. Like everybody these days, the kind person likened the glittering generalities to Kennedy’s speech about going to the moon in the next decade.

It didn’t help. That is, I sort of know what the moon is. It’s a rock with a mass I could look up to calculate its gravitational force. Its apogee and perigee could be looked up to determine from what spot on the earth a craft would have to launch, given accelerations and velocities of available technologies. Robert Goddard invented just about every device used to propel spacecraft into orbit and beyond, then as now. (Goddard died in 1945.) Engineers would only have to decide how fast they needed to go and design a combustion chamber sufficient to provide the impulse to a manned craft. Goddard also studied up on the physiological requirements of sending people into space. Animals launched into space, as well as instrumentation, should have given a good indication of temperatures and electromagnetic fields spacesuits would have to buffer. That’s easy.

Now, tell me we’re going to come together with a vision of twenty-first century hope for synergistic and diverse empowerment. My eyes unfocus, my mind spazzes out. All vectors of thought prove equivalent. I might even sail past the goal without recognizing it, thinking I’m more than a few degrees off-course.

Then, there’s the national pride issue. In the 1960s, Americans were patriotic, and, for better or worse, they could be roused by rumors of threats to national security. Today, patriots are listed as terrorist, and everybody is supposed to embrace un-American activities in the name of diversity.