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After The New Year's Celebration America Remains Troubled And Directionless

Our ignorance drives a belief that complex problems can be solved by simple remedies. We want to project our personal beliefs as worthy in situations where knowledge and understanding are required. The results of our media-driven ignorance have been the disestablishment of what works in favor of that which solves a minor illness while setting loose an avalanche of unintended consequences.

Robert Butche

New York

Doing What’s Most Profitable

There’s something seriously wrong in the American nation. Our fellow citizens know we’re in trouble — but few understand why. Some believe it’s the Obama administration. Others sense our national malaise is due to the miscreance of Wall Street. Others put the blame on FED Chairman Bernanke, or Speaker Boehner, the Supreme Court, or Washington’s army of special-interest lobbyists.

Recent polls confirm a growing national belief that our nation is headed in the wrong direction.

What’s missing from these polls is a discernible consensus on what direction that is, or what direction might better meet our national needs and aspirations.

Based on what was published by Newsroom Magazine last year  [ 2011 ], all of the above people and institutions palpably share some of the blame by having done what we have asked them to do when our wants were:

• Irrational — as, for example, borrowing money as if the equivalent of tax revenues.
• Temporal — By ostensibly solving difficult problems with short term remedies when long term solutions were required.
• Divisive — By framing all issues at the margins of political dogma as if the equivalent of constructive dialog or centrist governance.
• Stupid — Choose your own for there is more than enough stupidity in politics to meet everyone’s inclinations.

Origins Of America’s Malaise Are Beyond The Beltway

Truth be told, what we published last years reveals a troubling and pernicious reality: The problems afflicting our nation today may be managed here in Washington, but their causes remain far beyond the Beltway.

One need look no further than today’s Iowa’s Republican Presidential Caucus to lay bare our national malaise. Our problem isn’t political  — it’s ignorance. We don’t know what we want, let alone how to achieve our goals. What ought to be clear once the Caucus results are known, is that as a nation, and body politic, we are scared and uncertain — largely due to the absence of a clear understanding of what scares us, and why.

Our pervasive national ignorance drives a belief system absent substance or logical foundation. Thus we have been drawn into believing that complex problems can be solved by simple remedies. S0mewhere in Iowa tonight, logical and well intentioned citizens will project their personal beliefs as if a responsible foundation for political decision-making.

Single issue politics and media-driven ignorance have largely disestablished rational thought in our media, our families and institutions. In its place our instant gratification culture has been infected with a shared national psychosis that favors policies meant to solve a minor illness while setting loose an avalanche of unintended consequences.

Big media and entertainment values drive nearly every aspect of American life. As a result, our nation has rejected the homey images and values projected by Paul Detlefsen, Normal Rockwell and Currier and Ives in favor of garish images of Times Square, overpaid athletes and ostentatious lifestyles. ‘How come?’, one might wonder in view of polling that rejects today’s profiteering values in favor of what our parents and grandparents supported.

Can There Ever Be Too Much Of A Good Thing?

Traditional American values, honesty, integrity, shared burden, self-discipline and frugality are out of favor. In their stead are America’s new values, instant gratification and rampant integration of entertainment as if news.

At the outset of 2012, hyperbole is still widely accepted in big media and politics in place of fidelity-to-fact, logic and reason. Hyperbole is so intertwined in media that it is accepted as if true — when it is in reality only another means to lie.

Chances are you’ve already noticed that in today’s America lying for profit, cheating one another, infidelity, deceitful behavior, and institutional criminality are the norm, not the exception.

The Rule Of Unintended Consequences

Our single-issue mind-set accepts ignorance even as it worships money and prizes irresponsibility. One of the unintended consequences is a pervasive  societal shift that accepts diminished values  in favor of a mind-numbing sense of entitlement.

As we begin the new year, our national direction is firmly rooted in phantasy: going in all directions, all the time. No wonder we collectively demand a continuing and seemingly endless harvest from social and intellectual crops whose existence depend on resources no longer being  tended, or worse, no longer being planted.

We have become a nation increasingly determined to consume what was created by those gone before. Compared to previous generations,where everyone was expected to sacrifice and share burdens and rewards, 2012 American culture expects others to sacrifice so that we might garner a larger slice of the great American pie.

These attitudes have engendered a mindless pursuit of material wealth — one that is unsustainable and immensely damaging to the middle class that powers our vast economic engine.

Has America lost it’s mind? Is the Boomer generation out to redefine this nation? No, none of these.

What’s brought this nation to ignore its heritage and deprecate its rich and creative culture is a failed, misdirected and values-less educational model. Not the educational mode one finds in a school, but the mindless and debilitating educational model we and our children are bombarded with 24 hours a day by big media.

Next time someone tells you our nation has lost its way, suggest they turn off their TV.