"My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working."
--Thomas Friedman
We are wrapped in a warped tailspin of delusion in this country. The thinkers continue to think; the writers continue to write; the workers continue to work, when are where they can; and the people continue to struggle more and more as the days move into the future.
The American people are under attack from their own government. The American way of life will never regain the peaks of the 1990's. And the worst part? Most are still blind to the decline.
A government of cronyism and corruption; not blatant corruption, but a corruption that has become so subtle and ingrained to the workings of the Capital that blame cannot be easily delegated. Who is at fault for the mess that our country has become? Is it the predatory lenders, the predatory President, or the predatory press? As the days wear on, the candidates start to sound more and more alike, the congress, the senate, the judges, quite simply exist in a separate plane than the American people who they have been chosen to represent.
“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else...“the political system seems incapable of producing a critical mass to support any kind of serious long-term reform.”
