Known for their egocentric preoccupation with fads, Americans are missing the far grimmer condition of their nation. The United States has been in steady decline from its preeminence as a global model.
Politicians extolling U.S. superiority really have only one asset of worldwide magnitude they can boast about today when talking of "the most powerful nation on earth"—our military prowess. Is that really the measure of excellence most Americans value?
Detroit is no longer the cradle of the world's automotive industry. Two of the Big Three—General Motors and Chrysler—are broke and on government life support.
Major corporations are pleading for new laws allowing them to hire foreign scientists and researchers to fill their needs. U.S. colleges don't produce enough.
Fraud and corruption are commonplace in U.S. society's most revered institutions—Congress, Wall Street, health care, religion.
U.S. health care may be the world's least efficient, when record national health-care costs are laid against the tens of millions of people who can't afford health insurance.
The onetime giant of economic stability is now the world's largest debtor, relying on credit and loans from the likes of mainland China, a tyranny with a blood-soaked history of mass murder.
The United States deserted its right to moralize when its president turned to lying to launch a war and adopted illegal torture as an acceptable tool. Now, our former vice president is celebrating painful abuse of prisoners as noble.
U.S. political discourse has gone psychotic—with the leading Republican voice telling millions by radio that President Obama's failure is in the national interest, while Republican governors advocate denying their citizens economic help as a form of statesmanship, and at least one has proposed to secede from the Union as a way of protest.
Climbing out of these holes can't be done with new laws or with massive financial bailouts alone.
Reclaiming global stature and respect requires a historic commitment to personal and public ethics—honesty, selflessness, work, shared sacrifice, a sense of purpose.
If the nation's decline in so many onetime strengths was a natural disaster like Katrina, Americans would turn out in force to lend charitable hands, filling sandbags, writing relief checks and manning volunteer jobs until every need had been filled.
Perhaps that's the unvarnished truth that must be told time and again—the nation is in the midst of a disaster of lowered expectations, lowered achievements and lowered morals.
There's no other way to describe what has happened to the standard bearer that has helped other nations through so many crises.
