This is a fascinating article by one of the most insightful columnists in the English speaking world, Caroline Glick.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia, until he thought he could challenge Vladimir Putin for the leadership of Russia through the Russian electoral process. Ten years later, upon being released from jail, he indicates he has changed his mind…and that the problem isn’t Putin. He says, “”“The Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” he explained. “The problem is that our citizens in the large majority don’t understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves. They are so happy to delegate it to, say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and then they will entrust it to somebody else.”
We can see parallels in this country. Our problem is not our form of government, but our generation of people who think that our future lies more in collective action than in personal initiative.
In responding to a question about his inclusion in his book, Things That Matter, a 2007 column about baseball player Rick Ankeil’s fall and return to the major leagues, Charles Krauthammer responded with a reference to a line from one of his articles: “…the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back.” We have lost faith that we, as a people can solve problems ourselves. Like children, enough people want their mother to take care of their problems that they have elected, twice a man to the highest office who has failed in everything he has ever tried, except in getting people to vote for him…solely because he promised to perform miracles.
Tom Brokaw wrote in his 1998 book The Greatest Generation, that the generation who grew up in the United States during the deprivation of the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, as well as those whose productivity within the war’s home front made a decisive material contribution to the war effort, “is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” He argued that these men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the “right thing to do.”
What in the world happened to the children of this generation? The “greatest generation any society has ever produced” has left us a generation of incapable whiners, children who are living with their parents, because no job is good enough for them. A teenager in Texas kills four people in an accident where his alcohol content was twice the legal limit, and is sentenced to 10 years’ probation, with no jail time, because of “affluenza,” the notion that his parents never denied him a thing in his life so he didn’t know right from wrong. Our children do not understand consequences, have never been deprived…and somehow think they are owed a living.
We have a chance to turn this virus in our culture, in the 2014 elections. We need people elected who understand what are American values, which are, as Denis Prager says, “Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum.” We need to elect, to the Senate, people who embody these values…and who understand that marriage between a man and a woman is the rock upon which our nation stands, that legalizing drugs has consequences, that there are no free lunches, and that social programs need to be paid for in order for them to be effective. We need to try as hard as we can to emulate that Greatest Generation, and become people who solve our own problems, with the help of our friends, instead of looking to bureaucracy to do that for us. We need to become Americans, agan!