You know what’s been bothering me lately? I wonder if America could collapse without anybody actually attacking us.
Last night, I watched “Brink of War.” It’s a movie about Ronald Reagan’s 1986 meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland. And I walked out of that movie with a question I haven’t been able to shake.
Reagan and Gorbachev didn’t walk away with some grand agreement eliminating nuclear weapons. But, the meeting helped open the door to negotiations that followed.
What struck me was Reagan’s belief that the Soviet system itself was fundamentally flawed.
You can build walls to keep people in. You can suppress private ownership. You can discourage competition and innovation. You can promise everybody a wonderful utopia.
But, eventually, people start wondering why a utopia needs walls to keep its citizens from escaping.
Three years later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years after that, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
And here’s what really got me thinking. What if America doesn’t need an enemy to destroy it? What if we’re perfectly capable of doing that ourselves?
We talk endlessly about freedom, but we’re increasingly willing to surrender freedom whenever somebody promises security, convenience or protection from something that scares us.
We celebrate capitalism, but then watch corporations buy affordable homes and rent them back to families who can no longer afford to buy homes themselves.
We cheer American companies for making bigger profits, while those same companies close American factories, move production overseas and eliminate the jobs that once supported entire communities.
We worry about foreign adversaries, yet we’re perfectly willing to sell American assets to foreign interests if the check is big enough.
We praise tolerance as one of America’s greatest virtues and it is. But, tolerance doesn’t mean you have to surrender your principles.
A free society should welcome people who want to participate in it. But, a free society also has every right to defend the principles that make that freedom possible.
That’s the irony I couldn’t shake after watching the movie.
The Soviet Union tried to control everything and eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Could America someday have the opposite problem? Could we become so tolerant that we’re afraid to defend our values?
So obsessed with profit that we’ll sell anything?
So comfortable that we assume freedom will always be here because it has always been here?
Maybe America won’t collapse because socialism defeats capitalism. Maybe it won’t collapse because some foreign army conquers us.
Maybe it happens because generation after generation slowly trades away little pieces of what made the country successful until one day somebody looks around and asks:
“Hey, where did America go?”
I’m Grandpa Grumpy. History has plenty of examples of civilizations that thought they would last forever. Right up until they didn’t.
So what do you think? Are we doing enough to protect the freedoms and principles that made America successful, or are we slowly giving them away?
I’d really like to hear what you think.