So what exactly are the problems facing our nation? If we're going to solve them, we need to articulate them. For the time being I want to focus on identifying problems before we get around to potential solutions. I'm ranking these problems in order of importance from my perspective. Feel free to disagree, but I'm starting with the foundation.
1) Education - An educated populace is paramount to the success of any country but especially to a democracy. Democracy rests on the premise that people are smart enough to elect the candidate that will best represent the interests of the country. Furthermore, a successful America requires trained workers and creative innovators to grow our businesses and spur our economy. While many Americans can and do attain excellent educations, far too many of our nation's students do not. I consider this to be both a moral injustice and a detriment to our country. By ignoring certain districts, schools and students we deplete our work force and deny future workers, leaders and innovators the chance to contribute to our society.
2) Global Warming and Alternate/Clean Energy - While many people refuse to believe in global warming, it is undeniable that our world is getting warmer and most credible scientists predict that this will lead to unfortunate climate change if we do not take steps to rectify the problem. I'm not a doomsday prophet but I can't understand why we shouldn't take climate change seriously. Even if the world isn't going to end in 2012, why take the chance? In the face of mounting evidence can we really afford to risk ruining the only planet we've got? Maybe if we're lucky, the current surge in global temperature will turn out to be simply the Earth's normal cycle. I'm not ready to take a chance on this. There are other problems highlighted here. America funnels money to OPEC countries because of a dependence on foreign oil. Many of the people receiving this money are not our biggest fans. Furthermore, alternate energy is the technology of the (immediate) future. For the American economy to remain the world's strongest, we will need to embrace this technology, manufacture it, apply it and export it. Failing to do so will not only continue to harm the environment but risk losing America's place as the world's leading economy.
3) Ineffective government - There are a lot of smart people running our country. Unfortunately they either cannot or will not work together and some of them are in the business or propogating lies to enhance themselves and their political party rather than making a real, concerted effort to better our society. In an age in which information technology has reached into every home in the country, people have become susceptible to latching onto false information and our political system has beomce polarized to the point of near paralysis. I blame this on both political parties and the media. If the guys currently in power can't get it together, we're in trouble. Perhaps the two party system is ineffective but since that's all we've got, it would be nice if the two parties would learn to work together rather than squabbling and spreading lies to promote their agendas. While one party is certainly more guilty of this than the other, it falls on the shoulders of both to make things happen. I fear though, that extremist groups like the Christian conservatives and the new Tea Partiers will continue to push the groups further apart with their crazy ideas.
You may be thinking that there are quite a few things I've left off this list and there are. Crime and poverty are big problems facing millions America. Our economy is currently struggling mightily. Mounting government debt scares many. I see these problems linked to the ones I've already posted. Providing Americans with educations does a lot more to pull people out of poverty and lower crime rates than government money. The economy is starting to recover albeit slowly and the one issue that our government seems to be able to find a sliver of common ground on is job creation and financial regulation. Mounting debt is bad but not terrible. Just over a decade ago we had a surplus and with proper policies we can recreate that in the future. Deficit spending worked during the Great Depression and has been advocated by economists for decades.
It is my belief that America can and will solve these problems but only if smart people combat the lies and misinformation that is being disseminated by politicians, the media and ordinary people who have fallen prey to the fear-mongering.
I will fight these lies as I come across them in the hope that, with accurate information, we can start talking about America not just as the greatest country in the world, but as the greatest country it can be.
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