An Aimless America: What's Killing Our Spirits

 COMMENTARY WND NEWS CENTER

MUCH ABOUT HISTORY

Exclusive: Allan J. Feifer contrasts today's nation with the past ethic of building and progress

By Allan J. Feifer
Published March 29, 2024 at 7:07pm

Everyman is all of us who believe in America as it was initially constituted and rightfully abhor the forced transfer of responsibility from the individual to the collective, i.e., the Deep State. 

Our incipient vitality and viability are being systematically sucked out of us. 

What we see as miscalculations, macroeconomics, social change, evolution and empowered government is nothing of the sort. 

We are witnessing a studied attempt to eradicate the America of old.

There's lots of blame to spread around; let's start with a few examples of what's killing our spirits:

• A bridge in Baltimore was struck by a container ship and collapsed; it was the only bridge under which ships could transit. Although vulnerabilities were known in advance, no one focused on solutions.

• Large road paving projects take up to 10 or 20 years to finish, costing drivers millions of extra hours in traffic and vastly higher public expenditures.

• Despite record orders for its planes, Boeing will build only a fraction of what it historically would produce in a year.

• Railroad derailments are at record levels.

• No major nation spends more on schools and teachers than we do. So why can't Johnny read?

• Why are people so financially insecure amidst record wealth?

• Why does it take so long to get any development project approved anymore?

• Why is it impossible to build affordable housing?

• Why could we send 12 men to the moon within seven years back in 1969 and now struggle with the technology to do it again, 50 years later?

Why aren't we able to do the things we used to do easily?

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Famed technologist and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen thinks we've lost our mojo:

"Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. 

Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. 

There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build."

The problem is that we've not only stopped building, we're regressing in many areas. 

Let's stop blaming the pandemic or positing other justifications for what are human-caused failures. 

What we seem to be getting better and better at is building lies and excuses!

Indeed, the pandemic added gasoline to the fire, which has been building for at least 25 years. 

Addressing what's broken in our system is essential. 

We've been living off our former glories and colossal doses of borrowed money for quite some time. 

We're vulnerable and much further underwater than you might comprehend.

Besides the aforementioned debt that is allowing us to get by marginally, three other factors stand out as primary drivers:

A. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, commonly called NEPA, has single-handedly doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or more developments it controls. 

In fact, the number of projects that die on the vine or take five, 10, 15 or more years to get approved amounts to tens of billions of dollars of economic loss each year. 

Never heard of NEPA? You're not alone. 

But tens of thousands of environmentalists, lawyers, scientists and politicians know it well, and it adds to the cost of almost every project built or proposed to be built in our country. 

Its effects are so massive that some economists think NEPA knocks between a half and 1% off our GDP yearly.

B. There is no cohesive national plan of development. Would it surprise anyone that the government is on both sides of almost every issue, promoting propositions through some agencies and then being sued by another government agency to stop whatever it is? 

Congress, the executive branch, the courts and the bureaucracy all take positions that create tensions that never get resolved.

Lacking agreed-upon national goals that are thoroughly thought out and mutually reinforce themselves, we do stupid things that frequently wind up being stopped midway, wasting billions of dollars and furthering no one's interests other than employing more government employees. 

Ultimately, the president of the United States is responsible for herding the masses into some semblance of common purpose. 

We haven't seen that in a long time, but we used to.

C. Our children used to be our Omega. 

They were the beginning and the end. 

Everyone tended to look out for one another, and most of us lived similar lives where children came first, God was a close second, and family and country mattered. 

We've lost something we may never recover with our materialistic endeavors and pursuit of self over sacrifice. 

Let's get God back into the picture and not find ways to continue to deceive ourselves that we can be the center of the universe; we're not..

Building things, making things and visions of what we see for tomorrow are being sidelined by far-left political narratives that place equity as the ultimate goal. 

While Everyman wants the same things his forebears did, progressives speak vaguely and confusingly to encompass end goals that seem lofty and reasonable but don't reflect human behavior and the realities of a world with conflicting priorities.

I just read an article this morning that I think exemplifies my concerns. From the Institute for the Study of War:

Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West – and will likely lose – if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin. The Russian strategy that matters most, therefore, is not Moscow's war-fighting strategy but rather the Kremlin's strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it and make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.

Our other adversaries employ this strategy as well. 

Democracies are messy and sometimes highly inefficient and lack clarity of thought. 

Only outstanding leadership by our House, Senate and our president can change the underlying dynamics. 

Very few of us see today's leaders as the best we could hope to have. 

Petty and shortsighted politics and a few outright crazies dominate our politics today. 

Most of us wish it were different.

The very nature of politics today drives away our best and brightest. I don't see any great solutions to the problem most people can readily see. 

All we can hope for is that Donald Trump wins and turns out to be the man we need at this time to reset the rambling and undefined course we are on that leads to the end of our once-promising experiment.

Everyman watches as the course of our history is set out before him, with little we can do except pray that God is not finished with us quite yet.

God bless America.

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