WASHINGTON – Everyone is talking about the American empire’s declining, but nobody talks about it like the Americans themselves. It’s an emotional and painful discussion that is being managed openly and explicitly.
The Chinese are beating us, they say, the Iraqis, Afghanis, and Russians are defeating us, and most of all, we are defeating ourselves.
Yet then you see them handling the giant snowstorm that recently hit the US.
If a snowstorm like the one that hit Washington would have hit Moscow or Beijing, we would see hundreds of fatalities lying in the streets; traffic would be paralyzed for weeks, and police officers would keep on finding abandoned bodies of frozen elderly for many days.
Only a few things are more impressive than seeing America’s organizational capabilities in action. A total of 200,000 people had their electricity cut off, yet within a few hours we saw large shelters ready for them, and hotels opened their doors free of charge.
According to the Washington Post, dozens of residents refused to be evacuated from their homes because they insisted on staying around and helping out their elderly neighbors.
Meanwhile, 12 hours after the blizzard, traffic lights were already in working order, the Federal Government was back on the job, the snow was shoveled from the main streets, and all across the Eastern Coast people got up in the morning and went to work.
Nobody would have been angry at them had they failed to show up, yet this is what Americans do: They wake up in the morning and go to work. They work seriously and diligently, they do not whine about how hard things are, and they do not expect a reward from anyone.
Perhaps we would do well to wait with the eulogies for the time being.
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