America's Most Common Jobs

 I have toyed with the idea for a couple of years of time travelers snatching Ben Franklin from his deathbed, treatimg him for pleurisy, and giving him a tour of modern America and technology.  His reactions to all this would be priceless.

Explain the IV in his arm. Explain antibiotics.  Show him an X-ray machine.  Show a CAT scanner in operation.

Take him to the kitchen.  Open the refrigerator.  Show him frozen foods.  Make pancakes.  Use a microwave oven.  Explain that most Americans do not employ a cook, housekeeper, or other domestic servant.  Show a Roomba.

When he asks what Americans do for a living, show him this list of the 25 most common  jobs in America.  When asks what software developer means, stumble through an explanation that he will clearly not fully understand.  When he asks why farmers are not on the list, explain farmers are a rare occupation, because machines allow 2% of our population to feed our nation and many others.

Drive him to the airport.  Take him aboard a Gulfstream private jet.  Fly him to a city in the Midwest.  Show him a map of the current United States.  

Take him to a shooting range.  Explain a semiautomatic metallic cartridge handgun.   Show him an animation video of how it works.  On a computer.  Take him to lunch.  Explain to him that the utensils are not silver or pewter but a metal that was unknown to his time: stainless steel.

Explain that food is cheap.  Drive to a wheat farm while a harvester is cutting the crop.  Go to a grain silo, then a flour mill.  When he asks where the drive belts and water wheel are located, show him an electric motor and explain how his work with kites led to omnipresent electricity.  Pull out your cell phone, call the time travel lab, and have a Zoom meeting with the nurse who helped Ben out of his deathbed.

Show him video of Apollo astronauts on the Moon.  Explain that America has sent space probes out of our solar system.  When he asks how the car knows where it is and shows a map on the display between driver and passenger, explain GPS and satellites in Earth orbit.  When he asks how and why all this technology exists, explain the V-2 IRBM, attacks on London, and U.S. desire to show the world our technological supremacy over an enemy nation.

Then, it gets dark.  A B-52 flies overhead and you explain that this plane can fly halfway around the world, drop many tons of bombs and fly back.  Explain it was developed after World War II to drop nuclear weapons on an enemy nation.   Explain the devastation caused by one bomb at Hiroshima.  Explain that Japan was an existential threat to the U.S., but we reformed them into a civilized and close ally.  

We will be nice and not tell him how much went wrong with our culture and government.  We will oversimplify the abolition of slavery so as not to discourage him about the Civil War.

Throughout, he will ask what words such as "arrow dynamics" means.