America’s Identity Problem Deeper Than Obama or Romney Can Fix

In After America: Get Ready  for Armageddon, Mark Steyn suggests that we are all wasting our time investing in short-term, shallow solutions.  The problems are deeper than politicians like Obama and Romney can fix.  They are moral and spiritual.  We have lost the sense of who we are personally and culturally:

     Appearing at the University of Denver in 2010, the talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America. Several enthusiastic members of the audience bayed “Obama!” and Mr. Prager found himself obliged to correct them.  “No, it’s not Obama,” he said.  “It’s not.  If God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness nothing would change.  Nothing.”

     This is correct.  Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him.  That’s what should worry you, not whether he as born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate.  That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped.  No, you duped yourself, America.  That’s the problem.  Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation….  A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive.”  For Prager, small government is a moral question:

     We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do.  Why? Are we born better? No.  The bigger the government the worse the citizen.  They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off:  Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions.  So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for.  That’s our greatest threat. We are our problem.