To the editor:
I read with dismay Checker Finn’s pre-Thanksgiving, glass-is-mostly-empty meditation on the decline of the good ‘ole U.S. of A. (“Dusk,” November 19, 2009). While Finn is surely right that our political leaders are failing to address big challenges in America today--from reforming immigration to fixing crumbling infrastructure to tackling the national debt--he is much too melancholy about the American character itself. (“Everyone is out for number one,” he writes.) We may be losing our hegemonic position in the world, but by many measures we are stronger domestically than ever before.
Two years ago, Pete Wehner and Yuval Levin argued persuasively in Commentary that the country’s social health is in much better shape now than just fifteen years ago, when Bill Bennett released his first “Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.” Since then the crime rate has plummeted. Teenage drug and alcohol use is way down, and volunteerism among young people is way up. There are fewer abortions, divorces, and teenage pregnancies. “Improvements are visible in the vast majority of social indicators,” Wehner and Levin wrote. “In some areas, like crime and welfare, the progress has the dimensions of a sea-change.” In fact, things have improved dramatically in almost every area except for education.
The Baby Boomers (a.k.a., “the me generation”) have long been charged with “looking out for number one.” And maybe that was true back in the 1980s. But since then, they’ve done a swell job raising their kids--the teenagers and twenty-somethings of today, who are exhibiting such healthy and wholesome behaviors. And these young people give us hope that America’s best days are still ahead of us.
Michael J. Petrilli
Vice President of National Programs & Policy
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
