We have the cheapest postage in the world, so we complain about postal service.
We have the cheapest food in the world, so we whine every time meat goes up another 10 cents a pound.
We have the cheapest gas in the world, so we organize boycotts to get the oil companies to bring the price down.
I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but compared to the vast majority of the world, we've got it soft and easy, and it's made us fat and lazy.
President Bush is gearing up for a war, yet he hasn't asked us to make a single sacrifice, because he knows that nothing would make us reject his plans faster than having to sacrifice for them.
Instead, his tax plan promises more for everybody (even though it'll deliver most everything to a few). Nothing makes us happier than more. More, more, more.
When I was growing up, President Carter made himself very unpopular by asking us to conserve and recycle. So did our Saturday morning cartoons. When the oil supply tightened, we squoze our long American torsos into tiny Japanese cars. You couldn't fit the average American behind the wheel of a Rabbit any more, because while we were conserving our oil, we were idling in line at the McDonald's drive-thru, super-sizing our Obese Macs.
During World War II, we weren't just asked to sacrifice, though we did willingly. We were made to, with ration coupons and quotas. Our propaganda machine got us to grow victory gardens, recycle scrap metal, paper, and rubber, conserve energy and materials, practice wartime safety. "Turn out that light!" "Was this trip really necessary?" Those lines in old Warner Bros. cartoons are quaint and curious now, but once they were vital and important and we were convinced they mattered, and because we were, they did.
President Kennedy asked "Ask what you can do for your country". What has President Bush asked us for? To let the rich get richer in the hopes that we'll join them some day--and let's not get into the obvious fallacy of that one--and to acquiesce as we mug foreigners and foreign countries. He hasn't offered us leadership. He isn't leading us anywhere. He's just asking us to ignore him as he uses our government to do what he wants.
Rosie the Riveter rolled her sleeve up and said "We can do it". Every American fought World War II--on the beaches of Europe and the Pacific, in the skies of Berlin and Tokyo, in the shipyards and factories and mines and fields, and in our streets, our homes and our backyards, too. Leni Riefenstahl may have made "Triumph of the Will" for Germany, but the real will that built the real triumph was in America and its allies.
Twenty-five years later, we put men on the moon.
By asking us to contribute, we built and built and built and built some more, until the American national juggernaut was more overwhelming than we could possibly have anticipated, until we had built a society so strong, so powerful, and with so many advantages that most of us didn't have to contribute any more.
For a generation now, Americans haven't had to think of anything but our own self-interest, our own selfish interests. We've become re-dependent on oil, but instead of trying to wean ourselves, we've concentrated all the harder on clinging to the teat. We've become fat, but instead of eating less and exercising, we prefer to complain, and to sue the people who sold us the food that made us fat. We've gotten rich on easy capital, but when the economy slows, we're not interesting in working hard to get it going again, we're perfectly willing to sign onto magic plans that will give everybody more money for free.
Our leaders have grown soft and weak right along with us. You can't ask Americans to give up their SUVs. That would be a sacrifice! Americans don't have to sacrifice! You can't ask Americans to pay more in taxes for good schools. That doesn't make any sense! It goes against years of tradition, of Americans giving less and less, not more and more.
America isn't in a lot of danger. Our economy will recover. Large-scale terrorism will remain rare. At the end of the day, we're still up a couple of touchdowns going into the last five minutes. But you gotta ask yourself. If it was the beginning of the fourth quarter, and we were down seventeen points, could we stage a comeback? Or are we too tired, too fat, too lazy to put out the effort, and we let the game slip away, while our stadium gets a little shabbier, and our victory banners of old get a little more faded and tattered?
We need a leader who can get us back in the game. We need a leader who can ask us to go out and work again. We need a leader who can tell us "This is where we're going, and this is how we're going to get there, and this is what we need you to do". When we find that leader, then you'll see something. Then you'll see an America not grown fat on past successes, but an America grown lean and strong on the promise of new successes.
I don't know who that leader is, but I want to vote for them.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Posted by Greg at January 28, 2003 3:27 PM
I heartily agree with almost all of what you say. But....
American workers during WW2 did not put the country ahead of themselves--or, rather, weren't willing to make too many sacrifices for the war effort. There were over 14,000 strikes from 1941 to 1945, involving nearly seven million workers. The United Coal Mine Workers strike lasted for seven months in 1943.
Of course, many of these strikes were against bad working conditions, horrible management, and other intolerable conditions. But many were done simply to make more money.
But your main point, that people were far more willing to make sacrifices then than they are now, is one I completely agree with.
Jess:
Er...good point. A quick web search turns up some very harsh anti-union rhetoric about union activity during the war years, mostly about closed shops.
And there's ample popular fiction about war profiteers, ranging from the villainous (Rex Stout's "The Silent Speaker") to the heroic (Daddy Warbucks of "Little Orphan Annie").
The personality of a culture is only the plurality personality of its members; there are conservationists today just as there were selfish bastards then. I'm trying to convince my readers that the balance has changed.
"The personality of a culture is only the plurality personality of its members; there are conservationists today just as there were selfish bastards then. I'm trying to convince my readers that the balance has changed."
With that I don't disagree at all. We are lazier and more selfish than we were, and the paradigm of national expectations has changed, no question.
I don't know who that leader is, but I want to vote for them.
You want CAPTAIN AMERICA.
Sadly, we don't live in the Marvel Universe. And the Silver Agent is dead, to our eternal shame.
--K
PS: Why, yes, I am just remembering the existence of your blog and going through it to catch up, how could you guess?