Write Your Congressman: Defend the Machine You Build, Not the One You Download
One truck this week left the line bolted together by hand. Two cabins arrived as screens. A republic should still be able to make the thing it drives.
To the Honorable Member of Congress:
We write on behalf of the machine a country can still build with its own hands.
This week, at a plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, a union workforce bolted together a full-size pickup and sent it in a crate to a customer. Ram credits the truck with 777 horsepower. We leave the boast to the company. We note only the plain fact underneath it: a person made this, in a building, out of steel, and a person can now load its bed, find its controls by feel, and fix it in a driveway. It ships. It is done. Nobody has to log in to make it move.
Behind that truck on the same day sat two new cabins whose headline is a pane of glass. Kia has fitted the Niro with a screen that carries a store inside it, where streaming services and display themes are sold by subscription, and a helper you summon by name. Volkswagen has given the Atlas a fifteen-inch panel and lit the doors from behind. Handsome work, both. But the news is no longer the vehicle. The news is the storefront mounted to the dash, rented for the life of the car, updated when a company decides and not before.
We take no side against the screen itself, and we name no bill, because none is needed to describe a drift this plain. We ask only that the republic keep the harder, older thing within reach: a machine assembled here, owned outright, understood by the hand that holds it, before the dashboard becomes a checkout counter and the driver becomes a tenant.
Defend the machine you build, not the one you download. Write back to us when you have.
Respectfully, The Editors