Can't do nation

Bill Richardson has a post on The Huffington Post (is that a post post? or a Post post?) posing a good, if obvious question: Where's the National Guard when we need it? Specifically, Richardson notes that in his role as governor he sent two fire crews from New Mexico to fight California's wildfires, while on the same day he ordered those firefighters to help out a neighboring state, 300 New Mexico Guardsmen (Guardspeople?) were sent to Iraq. Why isn't the California National Guard available to help fight the fires and their devastating effects? Because George W. Bush and his cronies decided to depose a tin-pot dictator and mired us in Mesopotamia.

There's a larger issue here: The willful and flagrant misdirection of the nation's resources. China's economy is growing at an annual rate of over 10 percent; our economy is projected to grow at a 2 percent rate (after accounting for population increase, etc., that's effectively no growth). China is making things; here, Facebook is valued by the market at $16 billion. When I heard Barack Obama the other night, one of the points he made was that we should be creating high-quality jobs by getting out in front in the green revolution. The point is hardly original with Obama, but the current regime is fighting a rearguard action against even admitting that there is such a thing as global warming, much less agreeing that we should do something about it. And that's not just the White House; its world view--if not its specific view of climate change--is echoed by powerful interests that want our status to remain quo.

The conventional wisdom speaks of limits: we don't have the money to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, we can't afford to take dramatic steps to clean up the atmosphere and slow global warming, we can't find the money for universal health care. (Reader AO notes that Bush vetoed S-Chip, which would have spent $35 billion on children's health care over five years, then sent Congress a request for $46 billion more for the rat-hole in Iraq, and demands that it be appropriated right now. The spineless Democratic leadership will probably go along.)

It didn't used to be that way. One of my favorite moments in The West Wing came when President Bartlet, speaking to his aide, mentions that FDR declared the US would build 50,000 airplanes in four years, and people said he was crazy. "And he was," the President continued. "We built 50,000 airplanes in one year." That was the kind of can-do spirit that used to activate America; it was what won the Second World War, created the Marshal plan to re-build a devastated world, motivated the nation when JFK promised to get to the moon in less than 10 years (we did it in eight) and provided necessary hope for the civil rights movement. Somewhere along the line, however, perhaps in the failure of the War on Poverty, we became a can't do nation.

We need to change the way we look at the world. We need to understand that we can take on great challenges, face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and prevail. And the way we will do that is not to protect the powerful, but to find goals that benefit the vast majority of our people, goals like keeping the world livable for our grandchildren, taking care of the sick and making the globe a better place for all peoples, not just American corporations.

The first step, the most important one, one that is hard but does not require wealth or power, is to change the way we think.