Are America's Best Days Are Behind Us? | God Will Fix It

HopeTracker| One of our favorite pundits Fareed Zakaria writes a tough essay for TIME ‘Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?

Zakaria echoes our persistent theme that Americans refuse to understand the complexity of America’s problems and the extent of our fall from prior first places in the world.

The loudest voices in America shout “just cut it!” Cut education; cut science; cut it all out, especially if the federal government is involved. Who needs the National Institute of Health? It’s socialism, damn it.

Indeed we must attack the deficit. But there is no thoughtful conversation that I’ve ever heard from either party about the high probability that just taking a random ratchet to discretionary spending, rather than tackling entitlements,  won’t hurt us more in the long run.

Cut out foreign aid, say Americans.

All Foreign Aid Less Is Than 1% of Budget

Former First Lady Laura Bush said last night on PBS that Americans believe we spend 25% of our budget on foreign aid, when we spend less than 1%. On a percentage basis, America spend less on foreign aid than any country in the world.

We live in a political climate where one can’t get the real facts into the public’s ears because we don’t want to hear them, and politicians know it. So they tell us what we want to hear.

Here’s a quick look at America’s top dog status on several key issues, all of them reported previously on Anne of Carversville: With other countries — including those damn socialist countries in Europe — investing heavily in the areas we see to cut, it will be a God-given miracle if America doesn’t fall lower in these standings in the coming years. According to Fareed Zakaria:

The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we’re 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they’re not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries. And, of course, we have by far the largest amount of debt in the world.

We would feel so much better about the future of our children if the politicians stopped talking about giving America back to God as our top priority and got down to the serious business of figuring our solutions to massively important problems that face us.

God Alone Can’t Fix America

This map was published in Philadelphia in 1833 by Carey & Hart, in a now extremely rare atlas, the Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented To The Youth of the United States, And To Enquiring Foreigners, By A Citizen Of Pennsylvania. I am so sick of hearing about God every night, with no genuine strategy for moving America forward, I do not know what to tell our children about their futures. (Note, I am not an atheist.)

The Economist has written that Americans can’t possibly believe that God will bail us out of these problems.

Sometimes it’s best to believe what you hear and the people right in front of you. We should suspend all rational beliefs, all knowledge of economics and science, and believe what we are hearing.

If we just eliminate Planned Parenthood and all reproductive freedoms for American women, God will fix the economy because he won’t be mad at us anymore. The perceived solutions to America’s challenges are that simplistic. Anne

Update on Thu, March 10, 2011 by Anne

Lady Anne,

You are not the only one!  I also am sick of hearing how God is to fix our land for us.  I know better, I went to the edge of atheist before hard logic led me back to understanding that matter cannot exist without time, and time a function of perception, ergo, when the absolutely needed sentience to create linear time, aka God, by which ever of ier’s (not a typo, gender neutral pronoun invented to fix the hole in English grammar) nine billion names we might use intervenes in human affairs it is with a touch so delicate, so tiny, and so precise that only a magnifying glass taken to the most accurate of histories has a hope of perceiving the point.  Flash bang just isn’t God’s style.

Anne, when you track an object in space… a planet, a comet… you build a history of its’ position in order to define its’ trajectory.  Societies work much the same, the history gives solid clue as to the trajectory.  Consider the trajectory of the United States, how it was set:  the collision of the northern colonies, religious zealots and refugees run out of Europe for being utterly insufferable, primitive Protestant cults by any other name, allied with the purely commercial southern colonies held by the King of England as property of the Crown in a condition I’ve heard called “salutary neglect.”  The days we are living now are the result of the consequences of that alliance once the huge advantage of all but unlimited expansion into an under populated wilderness faded away to population growth.

The key to defusing if not defeating those who internalize the perversions of religion (that are very much a driving factor in our nations problems) is to expose to both they and the world the historical facts of their origins,  that they are nothing more than a continuance of the same cults the Europeans rejected how many centuries ago?  I think this fact has been forgotten, but if ever fully publicized might have the same effect on the conservative Christian right as Luke Skywalker running a blaster bolt down an unshielded exhaust port!  How does one go about getting a major TV miniseries made to give the historical facts about the real nature of America’s so called Christian heritage?  To show Cotton Mather as the cult leader he was, and not so far removed from Jim Jones, to spin and pin the rantings of his descendents on defective men having nothing at all to do with the will of God Almighty?

Lady Anne, you are a woman of public presence where I am a most private man of no presence, you might know who to approach on this where I know I have no clue.  I am a private and invisible man, but I am a man of thought and I’m convinced this is the enemies Achilles heel.  I offer you this weapon should you wish to wield it.

CDM