This I Believe

I listen to public radio almost exclusively, usually from WSIU, Carbondale, Illinois. I occasionally hear an episode of In This I Believe which seems often to be concerned with someone’s story of a positive influence on their life, or how perseverance brought about a successful outcome, or about the United States.

My beliefs may be a little different. I believe that the American Dream, that of our founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the unparalleled public spirit in the ’60s (at least during the 63 years of my lifetime) under the presidency of John Kennedy, is dying. And it makes me very sad.

Our society is dying from a self centeredness that says I can do anything I want as long as I don’t get caught. I think we all know the examples: politicians and bribes, business leaders abusing the public trust for personal gain. Parents now defend children who do eggregious acts, rather than disciplining the child. We now experience violence in our schools, violence in our cities and even in small towns, and we have the largest percentage of population in prison than any other country in the world. We have the highest rate of unmarried teen pregnancy in the developed world.

While I would like to lay the blame on our current administration, this deterioration must have much deeper roots. What the current administration has done has only hastened the demise. As our world shrinks in terms of communication, mobility, manufacturing, marketing, nations become increasingly interdependent. Yet, we have alienated the leaders of most of our traditional allies. By the war in Iraq we have galvanized those who reject freedom and embrace anarchy. We have a national debt that equals about $27,700 per citizen, and which increases $2.17 billion per day! This will be on the heads of our children and our grandchildren. Our schools and schooling are falling behind that of other countries when we used to be a world leader. Instead of developing short term means to reduce our use of foreign oil, we have set goals out at Year 2020. What prices will gasoline and home heating fuel reach before then? We have a health insurance crisis in this country, with little or nothing being done about it. I was paying almost $20,000 per year for health insurance till I found an Illinois high risk program, and now pay a little over $1,000 per month for myself alone v my wife has her own plan individual plan since she is not covered at her job. Most people cannot afford to make such payments.

Our government thinks that all the world’s governments should operate on democratic principles, and yet violates those principles every day. Our government runs on ideologies concerning sex and family planning that are proven to be unworkable. We have a religious fundamentalism that drives much of our policies at the local, state and federal levels that make us the laughing stock of the rest of the Christian world. Common sense and intelligence have lost their value.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a diatribe against the Republicans. There are many fine Republicans that I would vote for. Further, the Democrats seem to have no central focus, no effective spokesperson, and have no effective platform. We lack the leaders of the past who could rally us and bring out our best.

This is why I feel that our nation has begun that inevitable decline that all nations eventually experience, and that our recent actions have accelerated this process. I am not terribly hopeful that our grandchildren and their children will know the freedom and prosperity that we have known.