Is America Committing Suicide?

Is America committing suicide?  Historically, all democracies do it eventually.  In a letter written to a friend in 1814, John Adams, second President of the United States expressed his unease about the future of the United States’ writing, “Democracy never lasts long.  It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a Democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

A quarter century later, another President, Abraham Lincoln, observed, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction were our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”  It was only because of Lincoln’s inspired leadership during the Civil War that our Union survived beyond the 1880’s.

Democracies are fragile.  Today, that truth is lost on tens of millions of Americans.  Since its birth in 1776, the United States has met and survived every challenge—from within and without–to its existence.  Our people have indeed been fortunate.

Why?

In his two-volume work first published in 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville tried to explain the secret to America’s strength and greatness.  He wrote, “I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers – and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerce – and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution – and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great” 

He was right.  America’s strength has always been anchored to its sense of righteousness about its purpose.  This belief grew from its people’s faith, values and culture.  It has been from this feeling of rightness of purpose, and that it is a force for good that its goodness has arisen.  A people who believe they are good will be more likely to act good.

Throughout our history, this values-based safety net has saved us from ourselves time after time.  Noting the source of our strength does not excuse real frailties and faults nor suggest that our people’s belief in their righteousness was not misplaced at times, but our Founding Fathers defined our national purpose in the first line of our constitution, declaring,

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The founders acknowledged that America was embarking upon a journey in which our citizens were charged with the responsibility and duty to do better.  Each generation of American’s assumed a responsibility to push the reality of our social, economic, and governmental existence as close to perfection as possible, all the while recognizing that “perfection” would always be out of reach and there would be more work to do.

Somewhere along the line Americans began to question America’s goodness of purpose.  This doubt surfaced in the 1960’s when our nation was torn apart by an unpopular destructive was, the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement, and the riots that burned many of our cities.

With the revelations of the Watergate fiasco and the Church Hearings people discovered that they could not trust their government.  The dam began to crack and the shadow cast by those tumultuous days, and fifty years later that era still colors and affects our political arena.

The past two decades, however, have seen a shredding of the social and cultural strength that De Tocqueville wrote about, and our nation has slipped closer and closer to the abyss.  Commencing with the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent continuous wars we have seen the country become more and more divided—more so than ever before.

The political, social, economic, financial, cultural and technological context has dramatically changed, and notwithstanding the election of the first African-American President the racial divide has become more pronounced.

James Madison wrote about the problems of political partisanship and political parties in The Federalist Papers #10.  He wrote:

“A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

I suspect we are seeing the worst of his fears play out in modern politics where the extremes of both parties set the agenda for each party.  Politics has become a bloodsport where the primary goal is to not to win an election, but rather to destroy the other side and throw them in jail.

The quality of political discourse has continued to decline, the attention span of voters can hardly tolerate the pseudo-substance of a thirty-second sound bite.  The insidious pandemic of mindless partisanship eats away at our governing process and institutions.

The economy is anemic, and people’s incomes in real dollars have declined substantially.  The Pew Foundation reports that Middle-Income Americans have been hit hard, losing both income and wealth, writing “middle-income Americans have fallen further behind financially in the new century. In 2014, the median income of these households was 4% less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28% from 2001 to 2013.

The gap between the wealthy and poor is wider than ever, and the poor are experiencing depression-level unemployment levels, with young blacks experiencing record high unemployment rates.  This phenomenon finds expression in the Occupy Wall Street and other movements that point out the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%.  There is little hope that things will improve.

The social consequences of the stagnant economy are felt in every level of society, but most profoundly among America’s poor and middle-income households.  Few of today’s millennials even know how far we have fallen.

The gap between the wealthy and poor is wider than ever, and the poor are experiencing depression-level unemployment levels, with young blacks experiencing record high unemployment rates.  This phenomenon finds expression in the Occupy Wall Street and other movements that point out the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%.  There is little hope that things will improve.

When I grew up a one household earner could support a family, provide for their basic living needs.  Not anymore.  Today, in those families with two adults, both must work, and one of those two probably works a second job.  The changed social infrastructure, however, makes the challenge even grimmer—the number of children born out of wedlock has never been higher.  An astounding seventy-seven percent of Black children are born out of wedlock into one-parent households.

At a time when the world economy demands an educated workforce, fewer and fewer kids are learning the things they need to know to get good jobs and even fewer can afford college.  When it comes to education, the United Sates spends more and gets less and less in return.  Our kids fall short when competing in the international arena.

The Information Age demands an educated workforce and the international competition is tougher than ever.  The effects of Globalism and Free Trade have hit our economy like a Cat 5 Hurricane.  China and India offer companies an inexhaustible supply of well-educated workers who work for far less than Americans.  A man who works for a large international corporation recently told me that his company could hire just over five very competent scientists in India at the cost of hiring one scientist in the United States–around $300,000 per scientist here buys over five there.

De Tocqueville would not recognize America today.

America is a nation in search of a new identity, a people suffering from collective historical amnesia, individuals who have no idea where we came from, and who or what we are becoming, or why we were able to come this far—a nation filled with people who have absolutely no sense of how fragile our existence really is.

Time for some Reality Therapy, but we live at a time when everyone seems to make up their own “reality.”  The daily news is scripted to reflect a narrative that may or may not be a fair representation of what actually happened or what someone actually said or did. Trust of media news is at an all-time low.  An article in the Huffington Post earlier this year said, “Only 6 percent of people say they have a great deal of confidence in the press, about the same level of trust Americans have in Congress.”

Our social, cultural, financial, political and governmental institutions are also rocked by a brand new and powerful phenomenon–information traveling faster than the speed of thought, being generated from millions, even billions, of independent sources from all over the globe.  The speed at which information travels has never been faster, and the size of the audience consuming it has never been bigger.

Over a billion people use Youtube.  Over four billion views of Youtube videos occurs every day. Every minute, three-hundred hours of video is uploaded to video and over six billion hours of Youtube video is watched every month.  The equivalent of 323 days of Youtube videos are watched every minute.   Over 200 billion Tweets are sent every year–that’s over 500 million every day.

Think about it, information today, moves over 33 million times faster than it did 200 years ago.  The speed with which information moves around the globe changes everything.  It means that political and financial leaders often have to make split-second decisions that have global consequences. There is not enough time to think, to deliberate, to consider all the implications of a given action.

Yet, any one of numerous internal or external issues can trigger a national crisis that threatens our nation’s survival.  At the risk of being politically incorrect, allow me to raise an indelicate question in our age of linguistic tyranny:  How many immigrants from third world countries or countries hostile to the very existence of America can we absorb before the politics of immigration policy completely disrupts our social, political, and economic fabric?   Is there a limit to the number we can absorb?  How long can we allow our borders to essentially be open to anyone determined enough to hazard the trip?

Yes, I suggest there is a limit.  What is it?  I do not know, but I do know that both the numbers of and nature—type of immigrants we accept affect our social, political, and economic balance.  For example, how many millions of low-income, low-skilled, uneducated, no-English-speaking immigrants can America absorb before our social services safety net comes crashing down?  How many immigrants who hate our way of life, have religious beliefs that are fundamentally contrary to our survival interests can we accept before the threat of terror turns us into a virtual police state?

How many of our civil liberties and rights of privacy can we give up to a surveillance state until we become all that George Orwell warned about in his famous novel, “1984?”  How much lawlessness will citizens tolerate before they take up arms to defend themselves against the threats of those who chant slogans to kill them?

How many expressions and acts of hatred and racist behavior can our communities absorb before the thin line between anarchy and order is breached, throwing our communities into cauldrons or turmoil and destruction?

How much poverty and ignorance can our nation absorb before those who have “too much of nothing” see no future in being part of civil society and take to the streets?

How many wars can we sustain and how much money can the federal government hemorrhage before our financial system collapses and spirals down beyond our ability to bail it out?

How long can we allow rogue and hostile states like Iran and North Korea (not to mention our problems with China and Russia), along with the volatility of the Middle East, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups to spread death and destruction across the world?  Can we prevent a rogue nuclear power from exploding one EMP weapon in the atmosphere over our country?  If not, can we survive it?

As China builds artificial islands in the China Sea to expand its control of the region America’s ability to keep the world’s sea-lanes open has shrunk.  America’s Navy has fewer ships than it had before World War I.  We are no capable of waging the two ocean war we fought in World War II, where the industrial might or our country produced over 7,500 ships for the navy, not including 124 aircraft carriers, and 35,000 landing craft.  At the height of the war, the United States Navy was operating over 5,700 ships.

The U.S. produced over 3,000 “Liberty Ships,” building one, “The Patrick Henry” in four and a half days.  The US was turning out three Liberty Ships daily.  During the war over 300,000 airplanes of various designs and uses.

All of this from a country that could not produce enough armored vests and armored Humvees for its troops during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As one Pentagon official put it, “The combination of warfighters who aren’t trained and equipment that doesn’t work is a perfect storm.”

And the veterans who suffer the wounds and lasting effects of war, what of them?  Our Veterans were thrown into battle by blustering politicians and then “thrown away” by unaccountable and shameless bureaucrats– thousands of them waiting in lines at the expense of their health and their lives.  We are losing more veterans to suicide than were ever lost in combat, over twenty suicides per day.

And what does all of this say about the character and capacity of our leaders?  Are we stuck with a feckless Congress and an inept Administration hell-bent on dismembering our military, while the world slides closer to the abyss of Armageddon?

Each of these and so many more questions that are just as real and just as much a threat to our survival, hover over us every day presenting real threats to our nation’s survival.  Meanwhile, our government seems to be incapable of governing.  Those in positions of leadership are primarily focused on their political interests and agendas—fiddling and fondling their way through the darkness of inaction while the threats around us grow larger and larger.

Is America Committing Suicide?  I’ll answer that question with another question: If we were committing suicide, what would we do differently?