Americans Slumber

by Mark Steyn - February 25th, 2007 - Chicago Sun Times

Patent case of no Yankee ingenuity
This is the title that Steyn put on his article, but it just didn't resonate with me. So I substituted "Americans Slumber" for my posting. Read his article and I hope you will see both are reasonable. I simply have a different take on the urgency of waking up our citizens versus pointing out how little innovation there is in government.

Five years after 9/11, we're not looking ahead, we're looking back -- in the legislature, in the courts, in the media: Bush's "lies" about WMD, the Senate vote to authorize the "use of force" against Iraq, Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, Joe Wilson's self-leaking of his mischaracterization of his trip to Niger . . . rear-view mirror stuff, all of it, endlessly. On the dark shapes looming in the windshield -- Iran, Sudan and much else -- we operate ineffectually through yesterday's institutions, like the U.N. and the EU. Two billion dollars from American taxpayers go to the government of Egypt and in return they give Hezbollah's TV network a slot on the state satellite system. At the gas pump, we fund Hugo Chavez and the Saudi radicalization of Muslim populations around the planet. The obvious transformative technology -- an alternative to the global economy's oil dependence -- is as far away as it was on Sept. 10, and the Alexander Graham Bells of our day are busy inventing the ''self-repairing condom'' -- a marvel of nanotechnology to be sure, but not one with much strategic use unless you can supersize it and unroll it down every Wahhabi mosque.

At a time when the world is facing some of the biggest crises in our history, most of my friends are appalled that I am concerned. They are quite content to accept the democrat line that we just need to look inward. The MSM beats this endless litany of trivial topics enumerated by Mark Steyn in the paragraph above. Anna Nicole Smith is the major story of the moment.

It is unfortunate. A large part of our population is sleeping. The only question of importance is "will it be too late" on the day they wake up and one or more of our cities lies in nuclear ashes because we slept while we should have acted.