Apparently there is a survey taken periodically of Americans that asks them whether they think their children will be left with a better America or not. Also apparently, the last time they did this study was the first time that a majority of them thought we were in for dark times ahead. Is this true? Is perception reflective of reality, or have we been brainwashed by the fear campaign?
It’s easy to see why people have historically thought the future looked bright; if you look to the past, rarely has there ever been a time when the later generation had it worse than the previous. And it certainly has never been true for America. I think this general feeling in America goes a long way in explaining the election and current attitudes in America. Bush ran on a campaign of fear and determination; I believe that this fear of terrorism was the primary factor in the results of the survey. People don’t see a good way to defeat terrorism; they feel that the US has been ushered into a new war where we can’t see our enemies. And this scares them, scares them so much that they think their kids will be fighting this fight indefinitely.
Clearly, these people understand that terrorism is a new breed of threat. It’s difficult, almost impossible, to stop determined terrorists from doing harm, especially when you’re dealing with a country as big as the USthat, theoretically at least, protects individual civil liberties and allows free immigration. But I highly doubt terrorism alone will change the course of American policy and America's future. There are some indications that our reaction to terrorism (the Patriot Act comes to mind) might, but so far, so good.
Doomsday scenarios aside, (though I think environmental concerns should not be ignored), there are myriad reasons to be worried about our children’s futures as Americans. We have a massive federal debt, a growing gap between poor and rich, and an increasingly competitive economic threat from the rest of the world. And those are just the economic issues.
Truthfully, there is no reason to panic about the prospects of America in 20-30 years. We won’t be plunging into third-world country status, we’ll still probably be the fattest and richest nation on the planet, and we’ll still probably be pretty technologically advanced. But what about beyond that? Can we expect to be the dominant nation much past those 30 years?
The US has several things going for it. We are the most technologically skilled of any country in the world, and though our infrastructure lags behind that of smaller tech-savvy nations like Denmark or South Korea, our ability to invent, create, and produce new technologies does give a great advantage. Historically, technologically advanced nations have always dominated less advanced ones, and with our land mass and resource advantage to boot, it doesn’t look like we’ll be yielding that advantage anytime soon.
There are several factors going against the US as well. The aforementioned economic issues, the most troubling of which is the growing gap between rich and poor. The enormous middle class has always stopped any friction between the two groups, but will this stay the case? Are we in for a Marxist revolution? With the corporate rich creating monsters like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, will there finally be too much pressure on the poor? Luckily, I think that the humanity of the US is growing, despite what this recent election may have taught us. Hopefully we will always have progressives (yes, that’s right, I called us progressives) working to defend the rights of the people as a whole, and not allow the majority to squash the minority, or the rich to destroy the poor.
That being said, are we in for a move to socialism anyway? Is it really the next step after capitalism? I think in many ways it is. It may not happen by the time our kids are out of college, but I think it will happen. As more and more people think globally, I think the next logical progression is to think more about individuals and less about corporations. In the context of humanity, capitalism’s free market forces lose out to socialism’s equality.
Federal debt and big government issues also need to be resolved. More than likely, the debt will eventually grow so monstrous that it will finally bring the government to its knees. This could be a good thing; a restructuring of the way the US spends its taxpayer’s money. Hopefully this restructuring will result in a lot more efficiency and a lot less bureaucracy. Either that or it will force us to sell California. So there’s definitely some uncertainty there.
Economically, we also have to worry about energy. Oil reserves seem to be dwindling (though they’ve been dwindling for 60 years now), and the hydrogen economy is still a ways off. Solar power doesn’t yet seem to be the answer, and nuclear power is still a no-no. How can we continue to use up as much energy as we do? Eventually our coal will run out. And will water really be the new oil? If so, it bodes well for the nation that has most of the Great Lakes.
End of part 1.
# posted by Stuart @ 1:11 AM
: 11:06 AM 