The Silver Bullet

Some believe in this rare but possible “Hail Mary.” Basketball players and fans believe in this last chance possibility. It is the last seconds of the game and the losing team can still pull out a victory if one of their teammates scores by succeeding at some great athletic feat. Here the silver bullet and the Hail Mary are similar concepts because a team can’t count on it to win the game it just happens to occur in the last few seconds. The Silver Bullet, unlike the Hail Mary, can be produced before one needs to use it and usually is. How does one create a silver bullet?

The Silver Bullet is a mythical weapon mostly used against the werewolf. A werewolf is a mythical creature that presents mortals with extreme danger, it will tear them limb from limb. It could also be a creature that symbolically represents horrible crimes of murderous individuals. A creature humans created and transformed into dark tales to make sense of nonsense. The werewolf is a danger that no one person can deal with by themselves. Immortal wolf pitted against a mortal man or woman.. In other words, they need a special mythical weapon to solve a problem they don‘t understand and or is too big for one person to deal with alone like the economy. The silver bullet represents mortals aiming their faith at a problem (the werewolf) that is too ferocious to handle by themselves. The silver bullet symbolically represents faith in god. To believe in a silver bullet is to believe in god and to deny its existence is to admit atheist tendencies: to each his own. Recently, the energy crises prompted president Obama to deny that their was a silver bullet to solve the worlds energy needs. Instead the president preferred a “silver shotgun blast” metaphor. Both the silver bullet and the silver shotgun are metaphors but they mean very different things.

The president, with this metaphor, meant to convey that a comprehensive approach was needed to lower energy cost and deliver a cleaner energy product for citizens to use and rebuild the American economy. The visual here is that many pellets of silver ideas fly out of the barrel (the barrel is the presidents policies) to shoot down the ignorant ideas people have that are standing between him and his reforms. The many silver ideas come after years of research, debates and trails. The faith lays in the hope that the idea or in this case many ideas will work to solve our problems and in the people that developed those ideas. While the presidents’ metaphor works as a visual aid for his reforms, it warps the concept of the silver bullet and is redundant at best. A silver bullet is a concept never meant to describe a presidents energy reforms or other policies it is a concept meant to describe a method of dealing with an urgent and dangerous problem that appears greater than one individual: having faith in a god. The silver bullet often comes after extensive planning, efforts, faith and luck while the Hail Mary is a last minute desperate and unplanned act of faith and also luck. While either happening (the Hail Mary and silver bullet) often materialize out of nowhere and at the last minute the difference is in the planning. A team does not plan to win the game by Hail Marry but scientist do chase the silver bullet.

The power of the silver bullet comes from faith in a god and the power of the shotgun blast comes from faith in the ideas packed into that shotgun blast. Those that believe in the silver bullet imagine that there is an endless well of inventions and ideas that can revolutionize the world. During times of stress people have “faith” that god will send an idea or silver bullet via a person and penicillin is a good example.

There they are, scientist, atheist on one end and chasing the silver bullet with the other. The silver bullet does not preclude us from self help (after all, God helps those that help themselves, right) but it is the last arrow in the quiver our souls carry, our faith that god will provide. The concept of radar was the silver bullet that the allied forces needed to overcome the Nazi air force and Luftwaffe. Many smart people got together to create radar but the Nazi’s had smart people too. So, why didn’t they come up with radar first? It was just hard work and luck to the atheist and to the person that believes in a silver bullet it was hard work, luck and their faith in god. The idea of a silver bullet never included solving everything, just the werewolf problem like radar did not win WWII by itself it killed the big bad wolf that was going to tear the allies limb from limb.

Electricity transformed into light was another silver bullet that was created by hard work and a little luck. Smart people around the world were trying to discover how to manipulate and use electricity to benefit economic growth but it was the United States that “lucked out” because it was her citizens who had the ideas or connected all the dots first. Another unexpected silver bullet was the “horseless carriage” or the automobile built on a Ford production line. These silver bullets came at a time when people needed them, our country needed them, to appear but also these ideas came on gods schedule. We can prove that the concept of electricity into light was the end result of centuries of hard scientific enquiry but not that the discovery Edison came up with arrived on gods schedule. That Edison was a U.S citizen was just plane luck because many brains around the globe were chasing that silver bullet. The thing is that the concept of “luck” is another way of saying percentages. So, if the percentages have delivered in the past shouldn’t we believe that they might deliver in the future? All I am saying is that what some people call percentages others call faith in god and silver bullets do appear now and then out of nowhere.

The long and the short of it is that if you’re an atheist and don’t believe in a silver bullet I can understand. What I don’t understand is how can a person that believes in god, like president Obama, not have faith that a silver bullet is out there or that it exists but just waiting for us discover? The idea to solve our energy problems is probably just out of our reach. Just out of our reach like many of the silver bullets I mentioned earlier were just out of the reach of our competitors in the past. How hard are we trying to reach for the silver bullet? Comprehensives approaches are the right strategy sometimes but at other times a silver bullet is what is called for and the effort to reach for it is very important. This is why education must be funded and especially during the most difficult times. The word “stimulus” is a bad word right now because the economy is not creating the jobs fast enough to satisfy a frightful and struggling citizenry.

Our nation needs people reaching for the radar and the horseless carriage of our times but educators and students need money. Those new silver bullets do exists just like the concept of the automobile existed before the first car was built. Every car on the planet can be melted down but the concept of the car would still exist. Education needs a second stimulus ejection of funds and before the summer sessions of 2010 begin. This second wave of funding may not provide the answer to cold fusion (a possible energy silver bullet) but it reifies the faith we have in our citizens that they will put in the effort needed during dire times and reach out for the silver bullets. Keep those that want to study in school reaching for those ideas that reshape the world. The more students are studying the more they are not taking up a job that another citizens desperately needs. Give the schools (Junior collages and state universities the money they need to higher the staff and faculty needed to properly reach for comprehensive solutions and silver bullets. Increase loans, grants, lower tuition to get the people, that want to learn, off of the job market until they graduate. Hopefully by the time they do graduate the economy is ready to absorb their efforts.

The current White House plan to “Educate and Innovate’ is not enough: it is a fair effort not exceptional. America needs an exceptional effort to solve her problems not a fair effort.  Students should work for their education, but there are workers that are not students. If students have the classes and the funding they need to complete their education they leave jobs open for those individuals that are not students. When students graduate they add value to our workforce. So keep the students in classrooms away from jobs that others could use right now a little bit more. If the economy is struggling to create jobs then invest in students and teachers beyond the current White House plan. For example, build and remodel junior and state collages which adds construction work that is badly needed. So for gods' sake, increase, the funding for collages and universities during the second half of the 2010 scholastic calendar and all of 2011.

These suggestion are not silver bullets but additional pellets for the silver shotgun metaphor the president believes in. Its just that I have faith that our citizens can deliver a silver bullet and that education will deliver results but those results depend on the efforts all of us put into the process: the exceptional efforts. The self help comprehensive approach to solve our nations economic problems is a very smart one to adopt and I am glad our president did just that. That fact remains, that even if the banks start lending the amount of jobs the U.S economy needs in the present is staggering and the speed at which the private sector is expected to create jobs is not enough.

In the meantime, it feels like the president knows he’s losing the game and his big plan for a 2012 election victory is to count on a “hail mary” shot from across the court but has no faith he‘ll make the shot.

P.S

Provide free water and free power to your corporations and sit back to watch the U.S economy out pace the others. The bargain is that citizens of the U.S provide an updated power grid, highway system, and re-pipe the country. Water can be better stored, reclaimed and redirected around the country to give U.S manufacturing and business a competitive advantage. Maybe given the new stylish U.S. highway system, free electricity and water investors will see the benefits of bringing jobs back to the U.S.

And god? “Science tells me God must exist. My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not meant to.” -- From Angels & Demons, the novel

Oh! Legalize marijuana!

Good Luck Democrats
Rafael Buelna



© January 2, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved. Posted in accordance with Title 17, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.