I've been away from town a long time — pursuing a life in the West — and a lot of things have changed.  For instance, there's the little white building that lights up at night to advertise "adult" things for the presumed entertainment of passing truckers.  As I recall, it used to be painted blue.

Many other things have changed, quite disturbingly.  I don't remember a town chock-full of pawn shops and loan sharks — excuse me, "cash advance" and "title loans."  I don't remember the building where you go to apply for food stamps being large.  I don't remember factories standing empty and bereft.  And when I drive from place to place, I don't remember seeing the same thing over and over again.

How did America become so needy?  I understand my parents and in-laws becoming more needy as they grow older, but my image of my country is that of "the one that won World War II single-handedly."  It's the image from a famous railroad poster, where Uncle Sam with a determined look on his face is rolling up his sleeves — and there are muscles there.  How did my country transform itself, in just a generation or two, from a paragon of industrial strength into a broke and broken-hearted debtor?

As I look around for reasons, I ponder Abraham Lincoln's quote, that "a nation divided against itself cannot stand."  So I wonder about "red states vs. blue."  I wonder if, when I cross a particular state line, the people on one side will be wearing a different-colored shirt from the others.  I doubt it.  Everyone I've ever talked to about matters political — those who actually had anything to say that didn't just come from the evening news — had complex and considered opinions that were nothing like what I hear on the evening news whenever I bother to actually watch TV.  There was no "black and white" division, no "blue and red."  But there was an often-voiced opinion that there is a serious problem here, and that it's getting worse, and that we had better do something about it.

From Washington, D.C., throughout the city and from shirts both red and blue, I hear nothing but "let them eat cake."  When told that their countrymen are starving, they simply can't relate.  Today, I see leaders throughout this land who don't really understand what's going on.

When you have entrenched business connections to the business of war, then war becomes your business, and a lucrative business it is.  When you see pawn shops and loan sharks multiplying like rabbits — if your chauffeur is unwise enough to take your limousine down those streets — then you merely think the plebes must be unwise with their money, not that they are starving and their fellow men are preying on them.  Or perhaps you happen to own those pawnshops and loan sharks, in which case, "so much the better."

Other men in other times were much more familiar with privation, and they wrote about it.  Even though the resulting books sometimes made them wealthy, or at least famous, the candid stories of abject want and poverty, found in books like Great Expectations and Les Misérables and even A Christmas Carol, are grim and telling — and conveniently forgotten in the "let them eat cake" world that the United States — my country — has momentarily become.

"The rich get richer, and the poor will die."  Maybe it has always been so, but sordid words like these do not get down to the essential question:  "what do we do about it?"  There's nobody else here.  There's nobody here to ride in on his white horse and smash the oppressors, especially if the oppressors are we ourselves.  There's nobody to tell us what we should do.  Nobody to make our lives better if we don't care enough about our lives to make them better.  No one to define a different set of priorities for our country, and for the global community of countries that we have built, if we do not first define them for ourselves.

It is obviously very easy to polarize a country, and thus divide it in two.  But no amount of bickering and finger-pointing across an imaginary aisle — in Congress or in a statehouse or even in a local council — is ever going to bring lasting change.  The only thing that will do it is a determination that things must be better, and that we are going to, single-handedly if need be, make it so.  As it was once said, "tear down this wall!"

Another famous leader said that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."  During the famous world wars, but also in the times surrounding them, fear was not the regularly traded currency that it has become today.

Division also was not preached.  In some of the darkest times of our country's past, the citizens were regularly told they needed to pull together.  Today, the country is being pulled apart in many different ways.

America was never before told by its leaders that America is weak.  The country was the world's bank, not its biggest debtor.  If ever our nation was actually counted upon to be "the world's leader," today it is quite reasonable for the world to ask where its leader has now gone.  We should be asking, too.

Image via Max Pixel.