Someone You Should Know

Please get acquainted with David Brooks.  He writes for the New York Times.  He is one of the best thinkers in America today and he speaks with clarity and concision. 

"The Gray Lady" recently went to a fee-based online system but you can read something like 25 articles per month for free.  Here it is May 9th and I have about 3 left.  What can I say, the bin Laden stories were pretty compelling.

So, you can read Brooks' latest column and any of his archived columns here.  Today, he is talking about ... well .... a lot of things.  This is the great skill - well-clipped observations followed by sweeping pronouncements that speak directly to the CORE of our issues.  And HONEST liberals and conservatives will enjoy his political balance.
He deftly summarizes a book's worth of causes to present this overall effect:

There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical. ... This is a big problem. It can’t be addressed through the sort of short-term Keynesian stimulus some on the left are still fantasizing about. It can’t be solved by simply reducing the size of government, as some on the right imagine.

My takeaway so far is that a radical shift in the American economy (NOT the cycles now but we're talking paradigmal) is exposing the fact that our system (wherever the gap may be) has no place for a 20% chunk of men who would've otherwise been productive in a manufacturing environment.  He goes on ...

If this were a smart country, we’d be having a debate about how to shift money from programs that provide comfort and toward programs that spark reinvigoration.

Wow!  That sentence stands alone as a defining critique of so many things.  Then finally, the question:

Should we be using our resources in the manner of a nation in decline or one still committed to stoking the energy of its people and continuing its rise?

And there are clearly so many things here.  Aside:  this is another reason why I admire him so much because he can put so much on the table and leave a good deal of it there without getting bogged down.  He's detailed without the minutiae.  So what I immediately thought about was kind of sad.  I thought of a cancer patient who is being treated.  And in the early stages of treatment, great care is given to attack the cancer sure and to balance the treatment with the understanding and the posture that the patient will survive and move on from cancer.

As we know, it sometimes doesn't work out that way.  And doctors are forced to make tough decisions on their patients who seem to have lost the fight.  Toward the end, every concern is given toward making the patients' last days as comfortable as possible.

Where is America?  Fighting vigorously to maintian and even get better?  Or simply trying to make the best of what limited time we have left?