Thread: America forever????

I am a true American I have multiple ancestors who sailed on the Mayflower, and I've had forebears in at least 3 wars Revolutionary, Civil, and WWII. If family history matters at all, my kin has justified our citizenship. For more than 20 years now, I've been observing that nearly everything seems to go in cycles, the repeatability of which depends on a variety of factors so that nothing ever really goes exactly the same each time. It's true in nature, it's frequently true in psychology and sociology. The exceptions are what tell us the most such as how, by the ice age cycles, we ought to have been cooling down for a few hundred years now, instead of heating up, so what's different about this cycle from the others?. The difficulty, of course, is that it's hard to observe the cycle from inside. Imperial Britons could not conceive of a time when the sun would ever set on the British Empire, yet it crumbled, individual countries breaking free until they're now just an influential part of a Commonwealth. It's happened to every large empire in the history of the world, and it will happen to the American Empire. And the empire after that. And the empire after that... I've been saying for more than 20 years, the smart thing for America to do would be to plan for that, to foster the organization that will inevitably replace us on the world scene and ensure our comfortable place within it, as benignly as possible. Clearly, nobody's been listening to me. America has a lot of issues, a large number of areas where it can clearly do better than it is. Brute force philosophy only works for so long, eventually you have to work smarter, not harder, and while we mouth that truism, we don't practice it in our military or education or social systems. And more than any other first-world nation we let money rule our society. Why is our health care so expensive, and so exclusively privatized? Why is our education and infrastructure so inferior? Why do our average politicians come across as used car salesmen, and usually end up being just as trustworthy? Money, and greed. Sevinn brought up Obama's presence on the world stage, and that's important. America, despite its desire to be isolationist during the last presidency, can't operate like that anymore. We're too big, we need too much, we outsource stupidly, for profit alone, and damn the domestic consequences, we import vastly more than we export, etc. We don't produce enough of our own resources to survive in the style we're used to. An isolationist or hostile stance is akin to suicide, yet that's what we had adopted. So Obama is ultimately saving the nation's life by rebuilding relationships internationally, yet being a self-obsessed nation, the populace doesn't see or acknowledge that, so it wins him nothing with the public. If we want to continue to actually earn a shred of the ego we're toting around with us, we need to give that sort of effort credit and support. Otherwise, we deserve what we get, basically. It's possible America is already the middle-aged ex-football player, endlessly reliving its high school glory days and telling everyone who'll listen how important he isused to be to cover up his current failure to be able to earn the rent. I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's in the future. I've said in other threads, I love my country, but I'm clear-eyed about its flaws and its future. I want America to be able to find a steady, secure, peaceful job and stop drinking itself into the poorhouse down at Clancy's alcohol being the metaphor for unrestrained money-grubbing by the rich and corporate, getting into fights and bragging all night about when it was really worth something. It just doesn't seem to want to do that.