A Less Mature America

Our government and other institutions are run by humans. Americans today do not seem to realize that. All humans make mistakes. Americans today can not accept that.

Americans are no longer as mature as they once were. As David Brooks states: "During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions." This is no longer the case. He goes on to say that "it was not because these institutions always worked well." This was, and will always remain true. The government will always try its best to serve its people, but it does not run perfectly and will never run truly perfectly. This is not what Americans today expect of the government. They expect it to be running perfectly all the time. This shows America's lack of maturity. This is an inherent flaw in Americans that must be changed. We must become more accepting of what the government does and realize that we are lucky that it is actually doing something for us, unlike many other government across the world.

With the happenings of the past decade, and particularly this past year, this attitude towards government has become even more prevalent. Americans first blamed the government for the fall of the economy and are now blaming it for not doing enough to bring it back. At the same time we are also angry at the government for the bailouts, for we feel that they should be helping the average American, not the financial powerhouses which run the economy. We - for some reason - expect government to be able to do more than is humanly possible. We need to realize that the government is doing its best to try and help the country and its citizens, and we need to accept that. We need to accept that like us, the government is run by humans, and that mistakes will be made.

This major shift in attitude and feelings has occurred mostly during the decade which just ended. The past decade was certainly a tumultuous once, but this was no reason for us to shift our views on government and hold it accountable for every bad thing that has happened. As a new decade starts, I can only hope that the upcoming years are better and that Americans stop regressing into childhood and be more mature in the future.

Source: The New York Times