AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL?

Think again.


James Gustave (Gus) Speth has a offered along essay at ORION -- America the Possible: A Manifesto that attempts to look deeply at the prospects of decline and rebirth of the American Dream. It begins like this:

LIKE YOU AND OTHER AMERICANS, I love my country, its wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry, profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren.

How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades and where we stand today? One way is to look at how America now compares with other countries in key areas. The group of twenty advanced democracies—the major countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others—can be thought of as our peer nations. Here’s what we see when we look at these countries.

To our great shame, America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;

• the greatest inequality of incomes;

• the lowest social mobility;

• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;

• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;

• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;

• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;

• the highest homicide rate;

• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;

• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;

• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);

• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);

• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and • the largest international arms sales.

Continue at ORION for Speth's analysis and vision of AMERICAN THE POSSIBLE which is, indeed, a beautiful vision of coming into balance and harmony with the modern world.