Rose offers refreshing change
I admire Charlie Rose, whose talk show on PBS is a refreshing change from the rant and cant crowd that populates the cable news/entertainment channels. His conversations with his guests are by far the most intelligent and civil to be found.
But Mr. Rose is an old-fashioned Southern liberal, and in a recent lovefest he had with former Sen. Bill Bradley, he enthusiastically listed a number of foreign problems the U.S. could and should solve.
It’s a liberal conceit that the United States has the duty – if not the right – and the capability of solving domestic problems in other people’s countries. It’s false on both counts. We have no duty to anyone other than the people of the United States. And (this is the toughest for liberals to admit) we don’t have the capability or the means to solve all of these problems.
Let’s face it: We are a superpower only in the military sense, and only because of our weapons of mass destruction. Our federal government has a debt of $8 trillion, a current account deficit that is dangerously high, a dysfunctional education system, a deteriorating infrastructure and open borders we lack the will to close. Americans themselves are spending on average 110 percent of their income. Household income is falling. We are bleeding jobs, both manufacturing and service, to cheap labor in foreign countries. Our court system is in bad shape, both in its civil and criminal divisions. Our culture is decadent. A fifth of our people are functionally illiterate. Need I go on?
These are all domestic problems, and that’s a full plate. If we don’t solve these problems, we’re not going to stay a superpower. But we will not solve them without leadership, and so far our political system seems to be failing in that respect.
For some strange reason, limousine liberals, so immersed in their comfortable lives, look right over the problems in America and focus on AIDS and malaria in Africa, bad government in the Middle East, destruction of the rain forests in Brazil, et cetera and so forth. What they should do is take a walking tour of Detroit or visit New Orleans or some of the schools that are falling down while having to employ armed guards.
My friend Tom Fleming says in some of his talks that people didn’t wake up on Jan. 1, 476 A.D., and say, “My heavens, it’s the Dark Ages.” The decline of civilization was and is a gradual process. It’s been so gradual in the U.S. that people now think it’s normal to have armed police in public schools and pornography, violence and profanity on television and radio. They think it’s normal for illegal immigrants to parade about waving foreign flags and singing foreign national anthems. They think it’s normal to ship jobs to cheap-labor countries and to tolerate the destruction of our own environment.
We are not citizens of the world, nor do we belong to the world, all the globalization malarkey notwithstanding. We belong to the United States. These 3 million square miles are our turf. The rest of the world does not love us. Since our bit of the globe is geographically blessed, people in less blessed places will gladly occupy our country if we let them. No matter how much you’ve been brainwashed, diversity per se is not a good thing. Neither is uncontrolled immigration.
Unless we find the will to focus on America and Americans, we’ll wake up like the Romans to find that the barbarians are no longer at the gate, they’re in the city. We can’t solve Africa’s problems, or Brazil’s, or those in the Middle East. We can solve problems in our own country, and we’d better get at them and get rid of those people committed to an empire rather than to a republic.
Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802