COS Indiana Newsletter January

What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped more than $30 trillion in national
debt on them—much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?
What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major
cities? What’s so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts,
and car jackings?
Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did
Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less
or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?
Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity”
principles of the prior civil rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement
fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?
Would the United States have won World War II with the current labor participation
rate of only six in 10 Americans working? Would our generation have brought all U.S.
troops home and quit World War I in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?
Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement
continue to decline, despite record investments in education?
Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living and security
because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities
and ancient prejudices?
Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time that it built
anything comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the
California Water Project—much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?
If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take the moral and material
world they bequeathed to us for granted, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to
our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to
the Axis powers or Soviet communism?
We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.
One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to
puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and the votes of relevant
elected officials.
Where’s the pantheon of “woke” heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas
Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?
Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public
and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and
Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?
Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we
lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” or
“brown”—often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.
But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and
oppressed, will future generations tally up each group’s merits and demerits, to
adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making the United States worse or
better? What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial
stereotyping—proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific
breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides,
assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?
Immigration—when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic—has been the
great strength of the United States, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to
abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in the United States.
But if the United States is so flawed and so irredeemable, why are nearly 2 million
foreigners now crashing its borders—illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a
supposedly racist nation that’s purportedly inferior to those they’ve abandoned?