If you ask people today what their biggest concerns are in the world today, you hear some interesting answers. The answers are not interesting because of what they are; they are interesting because of what they are not. To hear Americans speak, it’s as if 9/11 or 1776 never happened. What I worry about most is what Americans are.
At the root of our situation is the fact that Americans are no longer the type of people that made this Enlightened Experiment possible in the first place. Lincoln bewailed our pride. Reagan bewailed our dependence on others for our happiness/well-being. Jefferson bewailed our morality. DeToqueville wrote about how America was possible because America and the people who lived here started on a clean slate with a commonality of purpose, dedicated to the same propositions of Divine Origin and Individual Worth, concepts completely foreign to the Old World. However, in the intervening 180 years since his work, we have tried by degrees to become more and more like that part of the globe from which we severed ourselves in 1776, a part of the world, says DeToqueville, which can never reach what we have because of what they are.
By and large, America remains a Christian nation in affirmation. In application, however, it’s a different story. My first ancestors in this nation put away work to go to church on Sunday without putting away Church to go to work on Monday. Nowadays, my neighbors dress in the garb of religion, pretending to morality, but they lack the principles that tend theretoward.
Not to say Americans are bad. I maintain that America is still by far the best, most righteous, most compassionate, and happiest land on the face of the earth. America is not, however, as righteous and happy as she has ever been. We have become a nation of actors, pretending to attitudes, behaviors, skills and practices that suffice in short term relationships without tending to the characters that make men great. Like the people of Spain in Cervantes’ novel, we laugh at the questing Don Quixotes among us who see things as they ought to be.
The good news is that Americans have not lost sight of how to make America the land she ought to be. Like the Pharisees, they go through the motions of obedience, but unlike the Pharisees, they do it, not because people force them to, but because by and large they force themselves. Americans still decide to be good. We are the most generous people on the planet, and no other Christian nation contains as many open adherents or as many people who observe regularly the acts of the offices of Christian living.
For America to resume her place as leader among men, she needs to stop looking to the past for examples on how to proceed. It has been said that insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results, yet American courts, legislators, and activists point to Europe as the panacea of peace, where wars ravage and people savage, truly a poor exemplar for how to live a more excellent way. We have been conditioned to believe that it’s okay to descend to the lowest common denominator and by so doing become the recipients of actions rather than instigators.
My solution to fix American problems focuses on fixing American behaviors, attitudes, and notions. When founding the nation, our Founders wrote a national Constitution that defined principles and a proactive way of acting on those principles. Each individual needs to write his own personal constitution as a basis for making major, life-directing decisions, irrespective of conditions and emotions over which we have no control. That will empower us to take control of our own destiny and provide us strength and direction on stormy seas.
While America’s situation seems bleak, she has been far worse off. Although I didn’t live in the Depression or during the wartime rationing, I can still go buy whatever I want whenever I want wherever I care to purchase it. As such, I remain free from the reactionary reflex responses otherwise brought on by dismal stimuli today. I am free to choose my own destiny and live the way I want because yesterday I chose to live a life that binds me only to realistic expectations. I do not control twitterpations in the economy, but I control what I do when things happen, and so I remain the master of my destiny.
I am optimistic for the future. I feel that the current distress will right itself in time, so long as the government stays out of it. We got along fine in this country for 13 years, nine of which spent embroiled in war, before establishing the Federal Government. We can do it again, if we stay true to our principles and live as Americans ought to be- good and brave and true. I guarantee it.
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