If the unthinkable someday happens and America falls, future historians will debate the many causes. Here is what I believe will be some of them. If America falls, it will be because…

we believe that creating a government program and spending money will solve nearly every problem. When the program fails, our leaders learn nothing, and believe we only need to expand the program and spend even more money.

we continuously push difficult decisions on Social Security, welfare, and health care reform down the road, and leave a budgetary and financial ticking time bomb for future generations to solve.

voters are more concerned with following the polls – as if a political campaign was a sporting event – than understanding the issues.

the people whose job it is to report the news also seem to spend more time deciphering and debating the polls than informing the voters about the issues.

over ninety percent of the national media vote for one political party. Yet they lecture the rest of America about the lack of diversity in the workplace.

we have political executives who will not enforce the laws on the books, legislators who pass laws to gain political attention, judges who make rulings based on personal beliefs and not the law, and a media whose only job is to play advocate.

the people who are shielded behind “freedom of the press” prefer to fan the flames of hatred, divide our country, and choose political sides, rather than just do their jobs and tell us the news of the day.

anonymous comments on political websites are cited by politicians and the news media as examples of hatred, ignorance, and representative of the population, without ever considering the poster might be a foreigner, a trouble-making teenager, or the intended victim attempting to attain sympathy. Instead of a wonderful gift that could unite us, we have turned the Internet into something that has only deepened the divisions in our country.

we believe what we hear and see from the media over what we see with our own eyes.

political disagreements end abruptly when one side claims they are “offended” or accuse the other side of sexism, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, or homophobia. And we wonder why our citizens cannot carry out a civil dialog on any controversial subject.

an overwhelming percentage of public school teachers send their own children to private schools, but pay dues to unions that want to deny other children the advantages of a private education.

we blame everyone and everything for our collapsing education system, but no one asks the two most fundamental questions: What exactly are we teaching our children, and do our children really want to learn?

we are told that educational attainment will increase our country’s prosperity and make us better citizens, but we had nearly 5 times as many college graduates in 2012 than in 1950 (30.9% to 6.2%) and few would argue our country is better for it.

institutions of higher education are supposed to be zones of tolerance with the free exchange of ideas, but it is becoming increasingly acceptable that students shout down and silence speakers with politically incorrect opinions.

we once engineered such marvels as the Panama Canal, the mighty Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, and the Interstate Highway System, but today we cannot even build a simple fence to keep people from illegally sneaking into our country.

even worse, we probably could design the aforementioned fence, but we lack the political courage to do so.

still worse, anyone with the political courage to support such a fence is labeled a bigot, and is silenced and smeared by the opposition.

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