America-as-Spoiled-Teenager

Pissing and moaning and feeling victimized is a hallowed American tradition. Indeed, you could say that if only George III and Lord North had indulged the whinging of a bunch of spoiled landowning Colonials and let them take their seats in Parliament we'd all still be British today.

Of course, I'm not suggesting the Founders weren't the Good Guys. They were as uncommonly thoughtful and prudent a group of people as have likely ever been in collected in one place doing Big Things. And if they'd really wanted to maintain the status quo to their absolute best advantage, we'd have a Duke of New York and an Marquess of Detroit and a Baron of Grand Rapids and so on, to say nothing of a King of America (Would it still be the House of Washington? Who can say?). So no, they weren't greedy bastards per se. But they didn't like paying taxes. Even though the British had expended a great deal of blood and treasure protecting them from the French and Indians during the eponymous war of the 1750s and 60s and needed to replenish the treasury.

And so even as there was financial incentive for a revolution, there were ideals at play too. Particularly high-minded ones at that. And that, certainly, is as good a one sentence history of the United States as any. Indeed, when the South threw the nastiest temper tantrum in American history, all rooted in the desire to maintain an economic system advantageous to elites (that is, American slavery), we had Lincoln appealing to the "better angels of our nature." When the Roaring Twenties came crashing down and the common folks were left to breadlines, we had FDR aggressively putting people to work and keeping us company by the fireside.

Today we need that voice by the fire. The avarice and selfishness and fear to which this country has always been predisposed have no counterweight. We are as a petulant, spoiled teenager, unwilling to watch the baby if it means we can't take dad's Visa and meet our friends at the mall. We won't do what we must, because of what we want. And we have no one calling us on the carpet for it.

We wail and gnash our teeth at the merest hint of any governmental programs to break us out of the funk we're now in. We scream that the private sector, the Free Market, praise be, will provide, even as the titans of industry ship our jobs offshore and then tell us, well, frightfully sorry old chap, but you see, these folks over here on this side of the ocean will work for dirt cheap, so will you if you want a job. And we have a President who, far from questioning, to say nothing of fighting, this, accepts and affirms it as gospel even as the opposition demands more concessions from those least able to give them. We are a nation over its monthly limit on text messages, screaming in mom's face and throwing the flowers at her when she tells us we need to cut down.

But as mom will simply turn off the texting plan when she can make no headway diplomatically, so will we face our reckoning. Our country can not continue to stagger forward in this manner forever. Surely we will have lost time, surely we will never be the country we could have been, but we will find it in ourselves to build again.