President Obama framed the entire problem in this simple sentence. I find it reassuring that he can put it that clearly, because it means he understands it, and that he’s likely to be able to do something about it. While we act as if it just came up in September, the fact that we even think of it in that way is a testimony to the fact that this is a problem of our own making. Its roots are deep. We gradually cast away the safeguards that have protected us for seventy years. We held off Recession by deficit financing, and ran our country like a family that only pays the minimum on their credit card debt each month. We made bad choices at the polls; tried to govern moral policy instead of governing the country; and tried to restrict rights rather than protect them. But the worst part was accepting lies and distortions as if that’s all we deserved. The religious among us allowed religion to be coopted by power-players. The wealthy among us lost sight of everyone else. And now in eight short years, the people who advertised a Project for the New American Century flew away in a helicopter today having squandered what we had and what we hoped for in less than a decade.
Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
I’ve always said that there is no such thing as confidence. Confidence is what people think others have. But the President is right in what he says. We no longer believe what we’ve been told, because we slowly realized that what our leaders told us was either not the truth, or something they thought that was wrong. In talking the people about their lives, one frequently encounters people who have the mentality of orphans even though they grew up in intact homes. It doesn’t take long to realize this general truth – that children become orphans on the day they are betrayed by their parents. And by extrapolation, we’ve become a nation of orphans in the last eight years, maybe longer. Our leaders have talked about their powers like bad parents demand respect that they haven’t earned. They’ve talked about their powers as owners rather than servants of the people. They say they will be judged by history. But history didn’t elect them, we did. They didn’t serve history, they were elected to serve us. Our unconfidence is the insecurity of orphans. Our nagging fear is that this Administration was so bad, so off the mark, that the inertia of our founders dreams and our previous leaders won’t be enough to carry us through a recovery.
Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
I was bowled over by the appearance of Perlman et al in the program. The image – a disabled Jewish American, a Chinese American, an African American and a Woman American was absolutely terrific. Even more terrific was that you could not have found four better musicians on the face of the planet and that had ever so much more to do with the fact that they were selected to perform together at such a prominent gig as the inauguration of the 44th POTUS.