America, the Country of Geeks
I was reading back what I had just written about Apollo, and a thought landed on me that I had not planned to have. Gosh, I thought. This is why I love America. Not because of where geeks happen to be born — I was living proof that geography has nothing to do with it — but because of where they end up. One way or another, sooner or later, the geeks of the world find their way here. That is not patriotism speaking. It is simply something I have watched happen, over and over, for decades.
Think about who actually constructed that space program I just described with so much emotion. A German engineer who once worked for the wrong side of a war. A Black woman mathematician whose calculations nobody bothered to credit for half a century. Immigrants, misfits, self-taught tinkerers who could not be taken seriously anywhere else. America did not necessarily grow all of that talent from its own soil. It gathered it. It gave it a laboratory, a budget, and — perhaps most importantly — permission to be obsessive in public without being laughed out of the room.
That is the real magnet. Not the weather. Not the salaries, though those help. It is the permission.
And here is the part that concerns me, now that I have said the pleasant part out loud. That magnet is no longer unique. Other countries figured out the formula. They observed what happened here and took notes — and some of them took better notes than we did. They are funding their geek children now, seriously, deliberately, the way this country did after Sputnik frightened everyone into action. They are building their own laboratories, their own competitions, their own reasons for a curious child to stay up too late soldering something instead of scrolling.
Meanwhile, I look at our own children sometimes and I wonder if we have quietly stopped doing our part of the agreement. Not all of them, of course — there are still children taking apart the remote control, still children filling notebooks with questions nobody asked them to answer. But there are also many of them lost somewhere else entirely — distracted, disengaged, underfunded in the subjects that used to illuminate this entire phenomenon, or simply parked in front of a screen playing something that demands nothing from their curiosity in return. And I do not say that to scold anyone. I say it because I recognize the stakes.
Because if we lose that child — the one who was supposed to grow up asking "how does this work" — we do not merely lose one curious child. We lose the pipeline that constructed everything I just spent an essay being emotional about. And somebody else's curious child, somewhere else, properly funded and taken seriously, is going to construct the next thing instead.
I do not think this concludes in a tragedy, necessarily. I think it concludes in whichever direction we decide to direct it. But I also do not think it resolves itself merely because it worked out before.
So perhaps the real question is not whether America is still the country of geeks. Perhaps the question is whether we are still willing to do what it actually takes to remain one.
And always — stay focused, stay curious. I'm The Senior Geek.
Dr. Jose A. Cisneros, MD, Ph.D · seniorgeek.net
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