In time, we'll learn how our country's political foibles play out.  Will the United States retain even a semblance of the greatness it once possessed, or not?  Measured from our peak to where we are now, there's a Grand Canyon’s breadth of difference.

There was a time when we led the world into the greatest prosperity ever achieved.  American productivity and genius had the world marveling and trying to imitate everything from our arts and sciences to our culture.  Whether I was working in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Senegal, Israel, Europe, or wherever else, all you had to do to see and feel America's influence was to read the local t-shirts or listen to the local music.  Walk down any foreign street, and there would be a Coca-Cola sign or a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatery.  America's influence was everywhere.  People wanted what we had, and they wanted to be American.  (Many still do, because they implicitly understand what native-born Americans either no longer believe or never learned from their pampered daily lives.)

American generosity is legendary.  We ship millions of tons of food and grain annually.  I remember proudly seeing warehouses full of 200-pound sacks of wheat emblazoned with the "A gift from the American People" logo.  On occasion, in the 1990s, I sometimes saw those bags relabeled, thanking some dictator or warlord for his beneficence.  The grain would often be sold by the despots, or withheld to starve populations into submission.  American officials knew, yet allowed such abuse.

No nation on earth has been as generous, but damned simultaneously for that generosity.  Why do so many believe America to be permanently tarnished? How can this possibly be?

Let's first unpack how public opinions are formed.  (Remember, agendas to politically influence the average citizen using a false narrative falls under the broad topic of propaganda.)

To start, they come for the children — as Lenin purportedly said, “Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”

My fight against lies and misinformation began at a young age.  I remember being in the first grade and being asked at Christmas to collect money for a United Nations agency called UNICEF — ostensibly, the organization existed to supply food for children in underdeveloped nations.  My dad then showed me an article reporting that Cuba was trading our donated grains to a third-party to buy military vehicles — a manufactured food shortage — and I immediately understood that I was initially sold a lie.  I began distrusting the government and the UN, although I did not yet understand the imperative role that propaganda played in order to elicit loyalty to a central government as its agents starved their own people.  I did not understand how some could behave so inhumanely.

Sadly, I learned to distrust much of what my friends and their parents believed — which was how I came to understand groupthink.  I turned in my donation box to my teacher and told her why.  I can't exactly remember how she took it; but not well.  My dad however was pleased, and bought me a subscription to Human Events, a well-known weekly conservative newspaper.

Secondly, they wage a cultural war against everything that made America great.

Our country has been filled with America-haters for generations.  The world's emigrating intelligentsia, escaping places that either no longer wanted them or were actively trying to kill them, found a home in the melting pot of America.  Think asylum-seekers (well-versed in Marxism) from Franco's Spain, or communists of all stripes and persuasions coming to our welcoming shores with ideologies that would undermine the country that provided for their safety.  Our idle rich sponsored those who wished to turn our country into some revolutionary dictatorship like the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China.  The most productive and upward-moving country in the world, built by freedom and capitalism, coveted worldwide, was lost on those revolutionaries who came here.

The American middle class was born in April 1939 at the World's Fair in New York, where Westinghouse began selling the concept of a middle-class lifestyle.  Although we didn't create the idea of middle-class life, we became the world's most outstanding example of what capitalism and economic freedom could achieve.  All this was without the oppressive hand of government tinkering with Adam Smith's masterwork…the Invisible Hand.

Today, the middle class is under attack, in America and around the world: outright government interference, and less-obviously, Woke policies that are intentionally designed to dismantle what Marx and Engels call the bourgeoisie.  I pound my drum, warning everyone who will listen about the enemy within, excited at how much they've changed thus far.

American-style free enterprise depends on a couple of things to work correctly: the first is the possibility for self-enrichment.  Without that, there is no impetus to work harder. The second: a government that doesn't believe prosperity comes through heavy-handed legislation, but rather relies on capitalism to enlarge the pie for all.
Obama's government said, "You didn't build that!” — but every free-thinking person should understand that the government creates nothing, it only consumes.   Obama's handlers tried to clean up this utterance by saying he was “inartful” — but Obama was never inartful.  As someone who never worked in the private sector, he believes government has all the answers, while conservatives believe in individual effort.  There can be no reconciliation between these two philosophies.

Today, all levels of the American government employ about 25% of the workforce.  (This hyperlink shows the massive increase in government workers in the last ten years.  (Accurate numbers are difficult to find because unknown additional millions of contracted workers who work exclusively for the government should be included in the count, but aren’t.)  These individuals won't bite the hand that feeds them — perhaps without realizing it, government workers of all stripes belong to the “elite class.”

Return to our "A Grand Canyon of Difference" title.  Much as the Titanic story revealed, there are not enough lifeboats.  When the Ship of State fails, it will save its own a bit longer, but in the end, all will be together in the icy water.  This is the greatest lesson we must take to heart, and protect ourselves accordingly.

There is almost no individual safety net that does not have an end date.  Collective safety can only be found through understanding who and what is trying to kill us and then summoning the guts and determination our enemies don't believe you can muster.  Ultimately, we must return to our roots, as imperfect and unfair as you might have been told they are.  Only in an empowered and energized America, organized around principles of self and family, can we once again become that unique beacon of hope and prosperity we used to be.  Otherwise, think of us as little more than a dying carcass left to the scavengers.  What then?

God Bless America!

Allan J. Feifer—Patriot, Author, Businessman, and Thinker.  Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.