I was watching, for the millionth time, one of my favorite movies with Jody Foster and James Woods called Contact. I never get sick of that film and know the movie by heart. This last time watching it, something new occurred to me that I never caught before. In the movie, the world had to build this machine to travel to another place in the universe. To show the prodigious nature of the project of building such a machine, the movie stated that it was the most expensive project built in the history of the world. To convey that message, what number did the writers of the movie use to showcase the most expensive endeavor of mankind? What number did the movie proclaim it cost to build this intergalactic travel machine in the late 1990s?

They said, “a quarter of a trillion dollars.” That was the number the writers came up with to show how expensive it was. Now, this was not some 1940s black-and-white movie, Contact came out in 1997. So how did a huge number like that become nothing in such a short period in America? Try, if you would, to compare that number that was so huge in the writers’ minds to the bank heist in 2009 called TARP that was a trillion dollars. The Banksters got away with raiding the United States Treasury back then to the tune of one trillion dollars.

It puts it in perspective when you juxtapose the idea in that movie of portraying the most expensive human project to what Wall Street got away with in 2008-2009. It is breathtaking if you think about it. Think about how the American government throws around a trillion here and a trillion there like passing out candy on Halloween nowadays. Here’s a trillion for infrastructure, they say. How about another trillion for a pandemic? On and on, you wonder why we have experienced crushing inflation.

The writers of the movie were sitting around trying to come up with the biggest number they could think of in 1997, and here in 2024, the fustian politicians make that two-hundred-fifty million dollars back then look like peanuts today. Greed has taken such galactic steps in the twenty-first century. Our children are growing up in such a different world. When Wall Street and K Street can eclipse even Hollywood writers when it comes to their imagination, you know the government has lost its ever-loving mind. Part of me wishes we could build that time travel machine in the movie Contact, so we can all get the hell out of here.

C. Rich

CRich@AmericaSpeakInk.com

C. Rich

C. Rich is the voice behind America Speaks Ink, home to the America First Movement. As an author, poet, freelance ghostwriter, and blogger, C. Rich brings a “baked-in” perspective shaped by growing up on the streets and beaches of South Florida in the 1970s-1980s and brings a quintessential Generation-X point of view.

Rich’s writing journey began in 2008 with coverage of the Casey Anthony trial and has since evolved into a wide-ranging exploration of politics, culture, and the issues that define our times. Follow C. Rich’s writing odyssey here at America Speaks Ink and on Amazon with a multi-book series on Donald Trump called “Trump Era: The MAGA Files” and many other books and subjects C. Rich is known to cover.

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