If one wanted an indisputable indication that the United States of America will not survive, the answer comes from the response to a very simple question: Who owns America? China is an answer that comes quickly to mind. But it would not matter whether the response is China or Egypt or Australia or any other country. The simple point is that the U.S. is deeply in debt; and it is other countries, primarily China and Japan, who are holding that debt. But folks in politics, including Obama himself, are proceeding as if this extraordinary debt were not a reality at all.
Indeed, we seem to be more worried about political correctness than pursing our economic good of not being so very financially dependent upon China and Japan. So, there are all sort of silly explanations for why no one thought it odd that Nidal Malik Hasan was contacting the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Indeed, I have heard it said that “Diversity is the military’s greatest strength”. To me, that is rather like saying that when it comes to the pilot of commercial jets, we should strive for diversity rather than competency.
The more general point, though, is that something has gone terribly wrong when we bend over backwards to be politically correct all the while drowning in a sea of debt.
Alas, the absurdness of political correctness may speak to what is indeed the problem. We as a nation have mastered the art of overlooking the absolute obvious. We have become geniuses at doing so. And it is that simple reality that bespeaks our downfall.
Before anyone should think to call me a pessimist, let me note the following: If I am on a jet and I see that one of the engines has just fallen off, it is not pessimism—but good old fashion realism—that warrants my assessment that the flight I am on is in big, big trouble.
Tuning our focus upon the United States again, my claim is that we have mastered the art of overlooking the obvious. Hasan is one example. Here is another one. Jesse Jackson has implied that Arthur Davis is an Uncle Tom because Davis did not vote for the healthcare bill. Needless to say, the healthcare bill does not even come close to being a piece of civil rights legislation. The bill does not accord blacks a benefit in society that all other members of the society already have. There are poor whites and poor blacks and poor Asians and so on. In voting against the healthcare bill, Davis was voting against the way in which all of these individuals would benefit from the bill.
How did Jackson miss the obvious: If one thinks that no one should benefit in a certain kind of way, well guess what: It follows that one also thinks that not even blacks should benefit in that way. How does that line of thinking on the part of a black make the black anything remotely resembling an Uncle Tom? Jackson could even think that Davis is reasoning foolishly about matters. However, reasoning foolishly hardly make one an Uncle Tom.
From the very outset, I have held that the change that so many have hoped that President Barack Obama would put in place could come about only if there was a spirit of cooperation on the part of the members of society. This means something unbelievably simple, namely that positive change is not going to happen as long as groups remain single-minded in the pursuit of their own special interests. Change was simply not going to happen all by itself.
This point brings me back to the enormous debt that the United States has. It does not take genius to see that if every special interest group sacrificed merely a little something, then the collective sacrifice would make an enormous difference in terms of bringing down America’s enormous debt. Yet, this ever so obvious point is one that so few individuals seem to grasp. In particular, President Barack Obama is not making this point. Or, more generally, he is not leading by example.
The protests by primarily students in California over the Regent’s decision to increase tuition stand as a truly striking illustration of the point that I am making. As we all know, California is on the brink of going under financially. As I watched the protesters on television, I thought to myself “Who, on their view, should make any sacrifices to keep the state from going under financially?” And so rather like a nation of lemmings, the way too many U.S. citizens are proceeding along as if America’s extraordinary national debt were quite insignificant.
What is astonishing to me is that a man who is indeed a truly gifted speaker, namely President Barack Obama, is not using the California financial crisis as an opportunity to make a John F. Kennedy-like call upon Americans generally to sacrifice something for the good of the country. This is the same man who found time to intervene on behalf of Henry Louis Gates.
Let me conclude by tying a number of points together. Like all skills, the capacity for rational reflection is sustained only if rational reflection is something in which we regularly engage. With the ascendency of political correctness rational reflection began to diminish; for there is something akin to a direct correlation between the rise of political correctness and the decline of rational reflection. And zero-tolerance is but the sibling of political correctness. In both cases, the very relevant particulars of the circumstances are made irrelevant to an utterly eviscerated conception of equality.
We cannot publicly sanctify this way of thinking without rendering ourselves masters at not taking into account what is actually relevant to the reality of our lives. The seeming indifference that most Americans have to the national debt is an example par excellence of way too many Americans doing just that, namely failing to grasp that the national debt is in effect an ever tightening noose around the neck of the United States. Grasping this truth does not require being an economist, let alone a Nobel Prize winner in economics. All that one needs in order to see the undeniable horror of America’s debt is what used to pass for none other than common sense. But, alas, the rumor would appear to be true, namely that common sense is dead.
It is ironic that a nation that found the morally commendable will to end slavery should turn out to lack the will to end its own economic demise.
