“We live in a sacrifice-free bubble of volitional delusion.” If Mitt Romney put his private fundraising speeches through a syllable-multiplying machine he might come up with something like that—generalizing, demonizing, and dismissive of entitlement-happy American moochers. And liberal columnists would mug him for it.
But in fact a liberal columnist wrote it. The line appeared in Frank Bruni’s Sunday New York Times column about the lost American virtue of sacrifice. “It’s odd,” writes Bruni. “We revere the Americans who lived through World War II and call them the ‘greatest generation’ precisely because of the sacrifices they made. But we seem more than content to let that brand of greatness pass us by.”
Indeed we do. And he certainly tells conservatives nothing new when he writes: “The size of the federal debt and the pace of its growth can’t be ignored.” And those of us who’ve long been dismayed by the Obama administration’s use of class warfare can only agree with Bruni’s contention that “[t]hese days sacrifice is what you recommend for others, not what you volunteer for yourself.”
But there is an extraordinary absence in Bruni’s discussion: the word “culture” appears nowhere. The column redefines sacrifice as a government ask, and not a personal or cultural virtue at all. For Bruni, sacrifice is to be reclaimed with an eleventh hour pronouncement from the president to render unto Caesar. Government will tell us to part with what is ours so that it can get America’s house in order. Simple as that. He wants Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to talk seriously about American sacrifice in the upcoming debates so that Americans will in turn think seriously about it themselves.
There is a great and growing divide between what our political reality demands and what our culture now produces, and Bruni gets nowhere near it. Sacrifice is vanishing because the cultural institutions that promote or sanctify it—family, faith, and patriotism—are on the wane. “In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all [American] twenty-somethings were married,” a 2010 Pew study found. “In 2008, just 26% were.” And in 2011, American births fell to a 12-year low. To previous generations the demands of family meant a life defined by self-denial, delayed gratification, and the giving of one’s time, energy, and money. Is a 42 percent drop in those who claim such an existence supposed to have no effect on the quality of our national character? Can this be fixed with a White House call to duty?
To the snickering celebration of progressives, religious belief is tumbling in America as well. Particularly among the so-called “millennial” generation. Among Americans 30 and younger, belief in God has fallen 15 percentage points in the last five years. With that belief goes the divine endorsement of selflessness, charity, and sacrifice. Indeed, the simultaneous rise in youth devotion to the Occupy movement offers a beautiful illustration of a generation’s transition out of an institution of sacrifice and into a sub-culture of entitlement. Frank Bruni should try interrupting an anti-banking drum-circle chant to tell Occupiers they need to sacrifice more because Obama says so.
And of course there’s the fading belief in American exceptionalism, today considered by progressives to be a kind of imperialist thought crime. Last November, Pew found that 49 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others,” while 46 percent of Americans disagreed. (In 2007, 55 percent said American culture was superior; in 2002, it was 60 percent). Why make sacrifices for a country that’s no better than any other on the planet?
It makes sense that Bruni avoids discussing the cultural underpinnings of our increasingly selfish citizenry. As Yuval Levin discusses in a brilliant essay in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, “the progressive view of government has long involved the effort to shrink and clear the space between the individual and the state.” Culture, in the progressive view, should collapse itself to make room for increased government as needed. It is not surprising then that Bruni not only looks to the president to simply decree a renewed sense of sacrifice but that he also considers the end of military conscription as a possible culprit for sacrifice’s waning.
The challenge of course goes beyond the nature of our government. One can rail against the entitlement policies of Barack Obama and others but in a sense those policies are a form of accommodation with a culture that’s turning away from the non-governmental institutions that promote personal responsibility, charity, and sacrifice. Frank Bruni finds it “odd” that we’re giving up on a virtue we praise only because he pays no attention to how that virtue was instilled and passed on. He quotes a string of presidents who spoke of American sacrifice in this or that light, as if “sacrifice” is an incantation or logic command to be programmed into our political life when desperately needed. It is not. Sacrifice, rather, is the personal and cultural reality of people who’ve toiled in hopes of seeing its delayed rewards—for themselves or for others. A sense of sacrifice is what generations of Americans found in the institutions that they built and maintained specifically because they expected neither moral nor material elevation from their government.
Religious belief, willingness to fight for one's country. These are the two "pillars" of any civilization that hopes to survive in a world dominated by human beings. We are what we are as a species—fiercely territorial, cruelly competitive. It's how it is, the League of Nations and the United Nations notwithstanding. And in fact as we see from these two delusional attempts to "unite the world," they play a not insignificant role in bringing an end to the brief periods of world peace they were established to promote and defend. n nOnly one cop has patrolled the mean streets of earth since World War II. The United States, via its military might and commitment (however flawed) to human liberty and the rule of law, has kept the horror of yet another world war off these "streets" for more than 65 years. Now, thanks to the existential errors committed by the last president, George W. Bush, and in light of the megalomaniacal ideologue we elected to finish what Bush began—the dividing of our people and the financial ruin of our republic—I think every man and woman that knows "how history works" can sense that this long American Peace is about to end. n nWe see the harbingers of it in China—which seeks to replace us as the world's dominant nation. Should we feel alarm at such a prospect? No, we should feel terror, for China is a nation whose 1.3 billion citizens are "not like us." To put it mildly. These are folks who were willing to follow a fanatical leader, Mao Zedong, just as Hitler's and Stalin's people were. 'The ones who resisted, were largely eliminated. Today's Chinese, in my direct experience, view that US and other nations as impediments to their future glory. As I say, we should be terrified at the prospect of Chinese ascension to the title of World Superpower. But it doesn't have to happen. n nHowever, if we elect Barack Obama to another term as president, he may consolidate his already considerable power, and then build it into an extra-constitutional force that the other two branches of our government will be unable to stop. Remember his now-shelved promise to create a civilian youth corps that would be larger than the military and better funded (his words, not mine)? What did voters think he had in mind—a few million inner-city kids "armed" with shovels and picks, heading out to work each day to repave the nations bridges and roads? This is what a man like Barack Obama had in mind? Are we that unaware of what Marxist ideologues mean by "civilian youth corps?" n nThis is a man with a plan. We call naive at our peril. And when we cannot put the pieces together, e.g. the attempted cover-up of the terror-attack in Benghazi, the attempt to call the Moslem Brotherhood a non-violent organization, the painting of Bashar Assad as a "moderate and reformer," the approaches to a dictator like Putin, the failure to support the "freedom marchers" in Teheran, the attempt to portray the Arab Spring as unconnected to the global jihad movement, the deterioration of relations with Israel by design, the abandonment of Iraq at the moment when peace and stability might have been possible there, the outreach to the clearly irrational Iranian mullahs, the deep bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the rejection of legitimate constitutional government in Honduras in favor of a would-be Chavista Marxist, and so on, and so on, and so on. And now there is the attempt to gut our military, render it unable to deal with the two serious enemies we face: China and Iran. n nAnd there is our economy, mired hopelessly in debt. And what does Obama want to do about it? He wants to increase the debt. Why? To everyone of the "pieces" there is a "why?" What are they by themselves? What do they add up to as a whole? Who is this man? What is he trying to do to us? Why? n[continued in next post]
[continuation] n nLast, since I have no answers to these questions, I can only relate my wife's wise observations. During 2007, she watched Obama deliver a speech that was broadcast by CSPAN. We were eating dinner and she turned to me and remarked: "He sounds just like Mao!" My wife grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. She knows what she's talking about. n nThen, just this past weekend, we had friends over for a sit-down supper, and the talk predictably turned to the election. Our friends all are on the fence, trying to parse the realities of the two candidates, not an easy task when the press and media refuse to tell the real story about Obama, but purposely omit and distort facts about both his background and current administration. Finally, my wife said this: "I will not vote for any politician who goes after our children, the way this man has. I saw firsthand what communists do—they form youth brigades, they empower kids to promote their ideology and to advance their cause. These kinds of men know that young people lack the kind of experience that enables us to think critically and accurately. And, they know that 18-25 year old kids are prone to rebellion. Anything that is 'mom and dad,' they're against it. That's why Obama is focusing on the kids—he's a kind of Pied Piper. But they're our children, not his, and it is shocking to me that Americans seem unaware of what he's doing to them, and why. Etc." n nI happen to agree with her. I also believe this is the key to who Obama is, what he intends, and why. The children of any nation, if empowered, will tend to destroy order. It's how kids are, all kids everywhere, which is why healthy societies put so much emphasis on childrearing and development, education, and promoting societal norms via strong institutions. But America has been an a "kids know best" tear since the 1960s. We have progressively (!!) assaulted the foundations of our republic over the last 50 years, and at the vanguard of this assault have been the kids and those who prey on the kids, men like Howard Zinn and now Barack Obama. n nLast, there was Anita Dunne, whose revealing remarks to a group of Catholic high school girls was reported only on FoxNews. Ms. Dunne, Obama's former White House Communications Director, told the girls in this assembly hall that "My two favorite political teachers are Mother Theresa and Mao Zedong." That's what she said. As for the rage lying just beneath the surface of the Obama couple, Barack and Michelle, it is best expressed in their own words. The president notoriously alluded to average folks in western and upstate Pennsylvania as "clinging to guns and religion." Michelle informed us that after her husband won the 2008 election, she "was proud of my country for the first time in my life." n nWe can ignore or dismiss any of these incidents, comments—and thousands more. But we cannot ignore or dismiss the totality of them—what they mean semiotics, what they tell us as to pattern and significance. Barack Obama is a monster, the way Lenin was. He is a man with "certain knowledge," not the knowledge of Lincoln or Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy, to be sure! His "knowledge" is of how to weaken and then "transform" our society according to his own ideas about how we should live. I don't think the Constitution gives him that power, and for this reason I believe we must deny him another four years as our president. If we fail in this, we may regret it for the rest of our lives. n nAnd BTW, there is something very wrong with the power we have given our presidents recently. We sit at our televisions and monitors and watch "them" duke it out. But it is our country, not theirs. We cannot permit the illusion that they are in a different world, in which we are just passive spectators. It has gotten to the point, that men like George W. Bush and now Obama actually believe this is "their country, to do with as they please!" Every time we sit in the stadium or ball park and let some "celebrity" sing The Star Spangled Banner for us, we participate in this dangerous illusion. How much farther do we intend to push it? n n
Well said. Much to think about. Thank you.
The sacrifice that has been asked for in the past has been to a national cause. The Greatest Generation sacrificed their lives and their youths for their families and their country. Kennedy's "Ask not …" was about the passing of the torch to a new generation and his call to arms for "a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." n nThe sacrifice asked in those cases was to something hopeful and uplifting, a plan worthy of America. n nNowadays, for instance, Obama didn't call for a sacrifice to insure the uninsured, he said, trust me, I'll lower the cost of everyone's healthcare while you get to keep the policy you have right now and while insuring millions more people besides, but will you stop calling them death panels! n nObama is as rigid as an ideologue, but does he believe in anything? In America at all?
I think it's very wrong for Greenwald to bring (''push in' a better word) the culture war into the sacrifice discussion. For example: 'And in 2011, American births fell to a 12-year low. To previous generations the demands of family meant a life DEFINED by self-denial, delayed gratification, and the giving of one’s time, energy, and money.' So, before we had parents (mostly mothers, probably) whose lives were defined by many children they had. They were denying themselves any pleasure, delayed any gratification till they are old and sick, but as a reward, they could say to their grown children: "Don't you see I sacrificed my life for you?', fully expecting them to be the same type of parents to THEIR children. Yes, those families (esp. Jewish like ours) were quite prevalent, and true, now there's a lot less of that. Families have children later, fewer of them, and normally every child is wanted and planned. And this is happening worldwide in the developed world. So all this is bad and selfish, and creates people unable to be generous and altruistic, without any high ideals? Hogwash.
The expansion of the redistribution portion of our government budgets greatly contributes to the hesitation to sacrifice by the individual. If our sacrifice is to defeat a totalitarian menace, well and good. If our sacrifice is to fund some common good like roads, justice or education, well and good. But if only certain citizens are asked to sacrifice so certain other ones can get sex change operations or Obama phones, well that's another matter.
We have returning military veterans who are looking for employment in one of the worst job markets since WWII. Knowing this, the president recently issued an executive order for "renewable work permission papers" for 1 to 2 million illegal adults. The announcement said young adults were required to have high school diplomas, but a few weeks later it was people who MIGHT take literacy classes. n nThis one example illustrates this president's operating mechanism. Pretend to admire what is good about America (soldiers who put their life on the line for the POTUS and the rest of us) and stick a metaphorical knife in the back of same with a charming smile. n nDeaths of soldiers in Afghanistan have skyrocketed under the leadership of this genius. US soldiers are told it is their fault if an Afghan "trainee" shoots them in the back. US Army officers imply that ambushes on US soldiers are because our soldiers aren't' sensitive to Afghani customs or Islam. Has a commander in chief in the history of the country EVER blamed American soldiers for getting shot in the back in a foreign war? n nAmerica is turning into an Orwellian dystopia. n n n n n n n
Let's face facts: The politicians and their minions have divided us up into classes, races, creeds, genders, age cohorts, i.e. factions. When politicians or their minions call on one faction to sacrifice, it's usually to goose bennies for another faction, not because that faction needs its bennies goosed but because the politicians need loyalty and campaign cash. Think Obama phones. n nWe've got to pull our heads out and wake up, America. The politicians and their minions work for us, not the other way around. Therefore, to the extent that sacrifice is required, they'll make it on our behalf. Mitt the Masterful is coming to Washington, all you minions, and he likes to fix things. Better get your CVs into shape: It's time for some sacrifice.