OPINION:
Is there anything in the world that can stop the United States of America? We were born struggling against the British Empire — the most powerful entity at the time — and we totally wiped the floor with those crumpet-gobblers. Later, we faced the Nazis. Imagine if today’s progressives had actual organizational skills, matching uniforms, and military might — that would be pretty scary, huh? But now Nazis are merely people who disagree with you on the Internet (is there a word for the strange feeling that you just did something ironic?). After the Nazis, we had to deal with the Soviet Union — people who were ready to nuke us into nothing at a moment’s notice. And what did we do? We dunked in their faces with our space program and then had a booming economy in the ’80s so great that the Soviets just gave up after realizing there was no way to compete with us.
When you look at our country’s history and the adversity we’ve overcome, it seems that nothing can stop us. And that’s the problem: As of right now we’re dealing with a whole lot of nothing.
Is there anything like the Nazis out there today, ready to destroy us? No. Terrorists are out there, and they’re awful, but they’re basically cavemen with guns. No one thinks they’ll ever parachute into a sleepy Colorado town on their way to overthrowing the United States.
Is there an entity out there like the Soviet Union that can rival us? Nope. No one is close to us. Some people think China is a little big and threatening, but they would never start anything with us, as that would destroy their entire economy. Plus, since they make all the iPhones, Apple would never allow it.
No, there’s no big threat facing America. Nothing on the planet even slightly contends to take our spot as the greatest country of all time. And that’s why this is the most trying time America has ever faced.
Does it seem like America is on an upward slope right now? No, we’re crumbling. We’re drowning in debt. The population has become lazy because of entitlements. We can’t figure out how to manage our own borders. We elected Barack Obama twice, for reasons that will probably baffle historians hundreds of years from now. We landed on the moon while the Soviets were threatening to obliterate us, and today Europe is landing on comets while we ask the Russians for a ride to the International Space Station.
It’s like the United States can only focus if we have a great, world-threatening challenge, and now that we’re all out of those, we just can’t deal. I’m not going to say we’re losers, but compared to our younger self, we’re really underachieving. We’re like a TV series that’s in its ninth season after peaking way back in Season Five, and we don’t have any good stories left and are just limping along with middling ratings — and the only reason we’re still around is that everything else out there is garbage. Who knows how much longer we can last? We’re running out of money, we’re letting the government bloat and allowing our freedoms to slip away, and eventually we’re just going to collapse. It would be like if Superman easily fights comets and alien menaces and then dies from morbid obesity.
So what now? No one can even come close to threatening us. We need space aliens to attack or something so we can finally have a worthy challenge and tap back into that American spirit that first propelled this country to greatness. However, we can’t put all our hopes into some entity trying to destroy us so we can save ourselves.
Some people want to make up world-threatening challenges, like global warming. Yeah, I know — scientists proved global warming by warming globes in a lab or something — but as a worldwide threat, it’s really asinine. To fight the Nazis, all Americans — soldiers, scientists and Captain America — had to come together and do our best to win. To defeat global warming, we need to sort our recycling or something.
No, to get this country back on track, we need to just buck up and face nothing. We have to stand up to the giant challenges we don’t have and achieve anyway. It’s not fear that must motivate us, but gratitude — gratitude for all those before us who faced down giant odds and gave us this country — this world — of safety and opportunity. We have to do all we can as Americans, not because an evil world power will destroy us if we don’t, but because we want to respect what we’ve been blessed with. If America can figure out how to be grateful for what we have and do great things even when there is no great threat, we will be invincible. We will be a country that nothing can’t stop.
• Frank Fleming is a columnist and author of the new book, “Punch Your Inner Hippie” (Broadside Books, 2014).
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