AMERICA: LAND OF IMPATIENT, IMPERFECT

KENNETT, Mo. -- We Americans are a strange and imperfect lot if an unbiased examination is made of today's happenings, moods and beliefs of the most civilized, affluent and pampered humans ever to occupy the Earth's stage.

Our society is the exemplification of mankind's dreams since the beginning: powerful, bountiful, beautiful, peaceful, structured, advanced, modern, almost free of scourges that pre-empted other cultures.

Yet poll after poll reports that despite our great advances, we Americans are often dissatisfied with our lives, our leaders and our culture. Americans believe they work too many hours, endure too many hardships that society places upon them, often declaring they have become the (innocent) victims of modern civilization rather than its innovators.

Our lack of joyful response to modern civilization, and our individual distinctive place within it, is not any psychotic manifestation: we truly feel this way and we have arrived at these feelings not through any malfunction of our brain's frontal lobes but from an internalization that is based on real feelings, if not precisely totally accurate and valid ones.

To paraphrase Popeye: "We are what we are."

Perhaps our season of discontent is to be expected. We have passed through countless hours of tortured uncertainty, starting when a small band of revolutionaries decided to balk at the orders of a sovereign who lived across an uncharted ocean and commanded the world's greatest army and navy. You have to be a little crazy to undertake a challenge like this, even if your hatred of King George bordered on the obsessive.

And no sooner did we jump this hurdle, our forefathers faced a challenge nearly as daunting: creating a system of self-governance that would preclude creation of autocracy, a system most logical humans then believed was essential if order was secured among the masses and if progress were to be achieved.

The uncertainty returned when our emerging nation faced the possibility of transmogrification over very basic differences: the venue of sovereignty, the right of rule, the issue of slavery and even the rights of commerce. Challenges of this nature had subverted, even destroyed, civilizations before ours -- and we certainly had reason to suspect that it would destroy our new world. Despite the high cost we paid for this divergence, we survived.

Since the 1900s, we have undergone other traumas that ranged from several near collapses of our economy, to two major world wars, an assortment of smaller conflicts that even though they may not have produced the number of casualties were not less lacking in threats to the fabric of a fragile society. Since the 1860s we have witnessed real or near impeachments of three elected presidents and the creation and then the proliferation of the world's most lethal weapons. And, lest we forget, we saw our nation become the first, and only, power to unleash this weapon against a civilian population.

Emerging from all of these crises, we have found ourselves clinging to an edge that may be as challenging as any we have passed through since the creation of our republic. Having achieved vast wealth, the most modern and undreamed of conveniences, relative safety from deadly diseases, and an economy that with a little help from our friends seems to remain eternally healthy, even vibrant at times.

America has achieved what Americans hoped for: the creation of the world's greatest military power, the most vibrant democracy in the history of mankind, the most envied nation among the world of nations and, despite a limping educational system, the most intellectually advanced nation since the Renaissance.

Quite a record for a band of immigrants, gypsies and scofflaws.

Despite this historically unbelievable record, we express our discontent in a hundred small, but significant, ways. As noted, we feel we work too hard, as if progress were attainable without labor, and we expect perfection from those we are privileged to choose, even if an alarming proportion of us fail to make any choice at all.

Shunning the polls and failing to take part in the democratic process are not as important to many of us as our right to judge, criticize and castigate our national, state and local officials.

It is not that the critics have made a special effort to inform themselves -- because they haven't -- it's simply that it requires less effort to call a president an idiot or a governor a stupid bum than inform ourselves and understand the issues of a democratic government.

It's far easier to bewail the lack of federal or state attention to a disturbing problem than become a part of the solution ourselves. We righteously demand that society resolve every dilemma from tax breaks for wealth political contributors to inadequate and outdated highways, particularly those we travel on.

We want easy answers to complication, difficult challenges such as drug control, while demanding that our drug of choice, whether alcohol or tobacco, remain legal and available at bargain prices. It is not uncommon today to hear citizens excoriating elected leaders while in the same breath boasting they never get their hands dirty by going to the polls on election day.

We want as little government as possible -- as long as we receive all the benefits we demand. The problem is not the society that has emerged, with or without our help, but in the eyes of the beholders who do not wish to play any game that involves their best efforts to understand and master.

This Gordian knot can also be found in the encyclopedia under "arrogance of citizenship." We should ponder whether our great nation is dying of a hundred good symptoms. The wise citizens among us will not delude themselves into believing that God is an American.

~Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.