Where is the next George Washington?

Sorry for exposing some of you to Glenn Beck. He is a bit fire and brimstone in a Paul Revere – Joe McCarthy sort of way. If you watched the first 10 minutes of Monday’s show ^[1] you saw him imply that America is in deep peril, and that only a spiritually inspired revolution would revive America. He even asked, “where is our next George Washington,” referring to Peter Lillback’s Sacred Fire, a book about Washington’s faith and it how it seeded a nation.

However, in suggesting that someone (like Washignton) or something (like a religious awakening) needs to jumpstart American prosperity again, Beck perpetuates a misperception that he would probably prefer not to. This misperception is that Americans are the beneficiaries of America and its politics and not the other way around, and it has lead to American mediocreism over the last 20 years.

American education, healthcare, technology, and prosperity went from being the best in the world just twenty-five years ago to flawed and deteriorating today. And the answer is nothing more complicated than this: Americans have become masters of entitlement. We work less and want more because we think we deserve it. And at first we did. The rewards of the first 200 years were sequential and proportionate to our civil investment. But eventually we, in a manner of speaking, became convinced that the bridges would build themselves.

America has always made large monetary investments into schools, technology, and infrastructure. But the American individual’s investment of personal time into America’s well being and productivity has shrunk exponentially. Teachers pass kids who do absolutely nothing. Workers demand more money for producing less. Business leaders take shortcuts to quick profits. Citizens vote for their leaders based on a couple of debates, party affiliation, and how they look on television. We see these things, and hope voting, political involvement, or political acts alone will make things right.

The election of Barak Obama was historical because of its reflection of racial progress, but it was a bit discouraging to see people so enthusiastic about such an unknown and unproven politician. This type of political fanaticism was a sure fire sign that citizens were more concerned with having their problems fixed than fixing their problems. Now more than ever Americans wait eagerly for the next wave of entitlement programs. But who will produce the wealth?

The point is that America is great because for 200 years we made it great. Americans were an enthusiastic, adaptable, creative, moral, and humble people. But some time between the 60’s and 80’s, when liberalism softened us and capitalism spoiled us, we started demanding prosperity instead of nurturing it.

Here is a news flash to anyone expecting change — no one person, piece of literature, event, or act is going to change the attitudes of our leaders or citizens. Just see today how little we respect the lessons learned from 9/11 less than a decade later. Each individual has a conscious filter of decisions, attitudes, and effort, which they can use to make themselves better people. This does more to create a nation than any leader or movement. The only thing that will improve our situation is an accumulation of our positive individual efforts day by day.

The catch is that there is no promise that your fellow citizens will do the same. So you have to act without fear that what you are doing in your own life might be useless. Just like in nature, just like in game theory, the best strategy for all scenarios is to do what is right for you and fair for others, with faith that others will do the same. And if that is the case individual by individual, it matters much less what our leaders do, because our incorruptible national resource will once again be our people.