Somebody Please Fix My Life!

With the furor surrounding Pastor Jeremiah Wright ebbing and flowing, Barack Obama on Sunday tried, again, to diffuse the brouhaha. Assuring viewers on "Fox News Sunday" the presidential election would not be determined by race, the junior Senator from Illinois zeroed in on what he believes is the core campaign issue. "I'm absolutely confident that the American people -- what they're looking for is somebody who can solve their problems." I am an American, but I sure as heck am not looking for anyone to solve my problems. Is it just me, or has something gone terribly wrong in America?

Almost as shocking as Obama's degrading assumption was the lack of any reaction to it. Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, not only didn't challenge Obama's indictment of the American people, but added his own dig for good measure. Earlier in the interview Wallace offered that "the lunch bucket crowd really wants to know what you are going to do for them." If a conservative like Chris Wallace accepts the premise that average Americans want political leaders to improve their lives, we may have crossed the point of no return.

Wrongheaded social policies have ruined large segments of the American population, but has the pathology of dependence also completely overwhelmed the American mainstream? Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) has nearly eradicated fathers from many inner city neighborhoods, but have the rest of us also lost our sense of independence and self-reliance? Have we been reduced to such a beggarly state that politicians are viewed as benefactors rather than guardians of American self-determination? I dare say, fifty years ago no politician, liberal or otherwise, would have dared presume to malign Americans by demeaning their ability and desire to care for themselves, solve their own problems, and work to improve their own lives. We've come a long way, baby.

A witch’s brew of government hand-outs, under-funded entitlements, and promises of more! more! has found willing acceptance across broad swathes of the American populace. The elderly are dependent on Social Security and Medicare, the young must have school lunches and college loans, and those in the middle just couldn't survive without day care, food stamps, housing subsidies, and the ever-reliable AFDC. Social engineering on a massive scale has created weak, subservient, sniveling wards of the state. And the conservative Mike Wallace, for goodness sakes, says we want more.

Just over 47 years ago, President John F. Kennedy called on Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Most adults living in 1961 had flourished under the twin challenges of the Great Depression and World War II. Enormous individual effort in the cause of a greater good was routine for what is now known as "The Greatest Generation." The author of a book by that title, Tom Brokaw, has noted that those intrepid people are leaving us now at the rate of 1,000 a day. Gone too is the gritty self-reliance that once was an American core value. A proud, resourceful people are being replaced by whiners, cadgers, and loafers intent on obtaining crumbs falling from the government's ubiquitous hand. For too many Americans, Uncle Sam has become Father Sam, the beneficent problem solver.

Shame on us.