Russ Latino
The challenges are real. Soaring food and gas prices are killing working class families. Our border remains in crisis, with record illegal immigration stretching the resources of towns and cities across the country.
Mother nature’s not been kind to the people of North Carolina, Tennessee or Georgia. The loss of life and property in the path of Hurricane Helene continues to mount. Across an ocean, wars are raging, from an intractable stalemate in Ukraine, to a Middle East poised to explode.
All of this is to say nothing of big picture trends on the horizon for our nation. Content to ignore one of the primary drivers of the current inflation crisis — government spending — the national debt has become an afterthought. But the effect of the debt on our economy, on future workers’ opportunities and tax burdens, and on government’s ability to meet very real needs will be felt nonetheless.
In the lifetime of people already born, America’s population will decline. At 1.6 births per American couple, we are far below what it would take to simply maintain our current population. This is an ominous cloud on the horizon that threatens our economy and programs like Social Security and Medicare that many citizens rely on.
We are standing on train tracks with a locomotive barreling toward us. Turning our back to the train won’t change whether it arrives.
Serious People Wanted
American politics have become a spectator sport. Our partisanship, a rivalry. The cycle is clear. Over promise. Under deliver. Blame the other guy. Rinse and repeat.
And as our problems mount and get bigger, so too must the rhetoric. It serves as a distraction from the fact that nothing is being solved for. It’s all a grift, from the political campaigns to the punditry that drives the narratives to the corporations feeding at the trough. Citizens are just marks.
But serious times demand serious people. At the beginning of our nation, our second president John Adams said:
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
We’ve been enjoying the spoils too long. It is time to get back to the study of the serious things so that our children and grandchildren are left with a better world.
Exhausted by the current merry-go-round, Americans are ready for real leadership. Look at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. It was serious, substantive and civil. No outlandish claims made, no bombastic elbows thrown. Both men saw double digit improvements in their favorability ratings.
We’ve been led to believe by a broken primary system, and by a media environment that elevates and rewards the loudest lunatics, that Americans want melee. Most Americans just want a sense of normalcy — to believe that the people charged with addressing looming challenges are competent and sober-minded.
