And then there were Three.
Irrelevant candidate Lincoln Chaffee dropped out of the Presidential race this morning, leaving no one in the campaign willing to stand up for a conversion to the Metric System.
Governor Lincoln Chafee announced today he is withdrawing from the 2016 Democratic Presidential race during a speech delivered at the 22nd Annual National Issues Conference of the Women’s Leadership Forum. (full release)
Although it could be possible that in a Hillary-centric campaign cycle, there was little interest in a candidate whose name sounded a lot like a rash, I think he tanked his own campaign when he suggested that the US should work on converting over to the Metric System.
Despite attempts for at least the past 50 years, Americans just don’t want to change. And for the most part there is no need. Yes it’s inconvenient to convert yards into miles, and square feet into acres, but so is trying to figure out if I need to put on a coat on, when it’s ten degrees Celsius out.
Other countries think Americans are lazy and stupid for resisting the change that they so willingly accepted, but the truth is, we’re just obstinate. We don’t like being told what to do, and we’ll do it when it makes sense.
Because for the most part, we’ve already changed. Auto parts are now completely metric. That means they can be sourced and sold all over the world. Likewise for medicine. And Liquor. But no one wants to pull out the calculator every time they’re making grandma’s pie recipe, to figure how many milliliters of sugar are in 2/3 of a cup.
Perhaps he thinks changing an entire nation’s unit of measurement is as simple as changing from a Liberal Republican to a Conservative Democrat. But his failure to generate any heat in this election, has proven that wrong. And it doesn’t matter whether you measure that heat in Calories or BTUs, Zero is a universal concept.