Now it is 1979, and I am in middle school—for math class we are all given our math textbooks, and a workbook on the metric system. For most of the school year we worked on regular middle school math, but we also spent about a third of our time on learning the metric system. That same year my dad bought a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, the speedometer only went up to 85 mph, but it also had kph on the dial.

The next year we learned more about the metric system, the conversion was imminent our teachers told us. Unknown to us the switch was never going to happen, and the die was cast before we even started studying the metric system in school. in 1977, then Congressman Chuck Grassley, now senator, stated:

"Forcing the American people to convert to the metric system goes against our democratic principles."

This was during a floor debate about putting metric measurements on road signs—a measure that Grassley killed.

When Reagan was elected, he killed the conversion to the metric system.

Correspondent Bob Schieffer made it known on the CBS Evening News on February 19, 1982. The newscast highlighted President Ronald Reagan's budget, the Solidarity movement in Poland, atrocities in El Salvador and the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. But audiences were just as eager to hear the last story of the night. "After a lot of hoopla and millions of tax dollars spent on commercials and other things to tell us why we needed to go metric, it is the metric system that's about to go," Schieffer said in announcing the dismantling of the Metric Board.

We never again heard about the metric system in school again, unless you were in a science class.

In 1985 I joined the Army, where I was trained on land navigation. All of the maps we used were in kilometers, and distances were measured in meters. When missions were planned it was always done in meters and kilometers. Yet I carried one and two quart canteens, and had to run two miles for my PT test. But we used 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm ammunition. So the Army was mixed bag of measurement systems. We used the metric system on things where we would have speak the same language as our allies, but the U.S. customary system of measurement when we did not.

Today, the United States is one of three countries in the world that has not adopted the metric system.

At this time, only three countries - Burma, Liberia, and the US - have not adopted the International System of Units (SI, or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures

Now we do have 2 liter bottles of Pepsi on the same shelf as 12 ounce cans of Coke. We buy milk in gallons, take medicine in milliliters, and travel miles down the road. I know that with all the things going on in the word today this is probably somewhere around number 999 billion on the list of things to worry about in the United States. But, it does speak volumes about the problems we have in this country. Changing over to the metric system should be a no-brainer—but instead of moving forward and doing it, causing people to have to learn something new, we have to resist it because of our “democratic principles”—in other words, it is something new, and we (i.e. conservatives) don’t want to learn it. Think of every other problem we have in this country today, and it is pretty much the same thing. Resistance to change.