Workforce participation rate is at an all time low, 47 million Americans rely on Food Stamps for their daily bread (and two-thirds of Americans are getting plenty, because they’re either overweight or obese), millions of Americans are losing their health insurance and millions more have simply stopped looking for employment.
Yet I know this is still the greatest nation on Earth because in California, people have time to really, really worry about the habitat of the delta smelt. So much so, that conservationists have been willing to shut off the water supply to some of the state’s most fertile farmland. Nearly a million acres are going unplanted. Unemployment is up to 35 percent in some areas, and farmers are losing over a billion dollars in revenue — but that’s ok! The habitat of the little delta smelt is preserved.
Obviously, if we really had it bad in America, we’d have to worry about more important things, like the collapse of the black family in the inner city, or the danger of Islamic terrorists slipping into our country. But we’ve got better things to worry about!
In his column this week, George Will described a few of the crazy things Americans have made it their business to focus on.
For example, on September 17th, Constitution Day, a student at Modesto Junior College was told to stop distributing copies of the Constitution until he had filled out the requisite forms for permission to use the college’s designated “free speech area.”
The Metropolitan Area Transit Authority threatened a Henry Docter with “arrest, fines and imprisonment” for the crime of unregulated gardening. Docter had filled 176 empty planters at the Dupont Circle Metro stop. The Transit Authority was briefly deterred by the public outcry against its threat to punish Docter. But then it had the 1,000 plants ripped out.
A video being used by the Department of Agriculture for “cultural sensitivity training” instructs employees to call the Pilgrims who created Thanksgiving “illegal aliens” - even though there were no immigration laws to make any of them illegal.
Isn’t this an awesome country? Some media pundits complain about the “low information voter.” But we have too many voters with too much information about all the wrong things.
When your belly is full, you have a roof over your head and 500 movies on demand, you have plenty of time to get worked up about what really matters: delta smelts and Miley Cyrus.
I don’t wish ill on my countrymen and women, but I sometimes wonder how bad it’s going to have to get before they wake up and pay attention to what really matters.
