"Dawning awareness"

Liberal columnist David Brooks recently observed that while fifty percent of Americans over 65 believe America is the greatest nation on earth, only 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe that.

I doubt if anyone is surprised by the huge difference.

Congratulations, David.  Your people, your side's theories and policies, are doing exactly what most of us here in flyover country knew they would.

You hated the notion of a strong, assertive America; hated the idea that middle-class plumbers in Tennessee could save enough from an average salary to buy 200-horsepower bass boats to pull with their 350-horse pickup trucks.  You hated the idea of capitalism and free markets, in which innovative, imaginative people just started companies to build whatever they wanted, without asking official permission from the government--whose agents presumably always knew whether some new idea was good or bad.

You and your fellow elites were constantly, openly contemptuous of Christians, the military, gun owners and conservatives.  Your followers down the information food chain--film makers, TV writers and producers, academics, local editors, down to highschool teachers--all parroted your "liberal" ideas.

You constantly complained that we should be more like those fabulous, enlightened Europeans.

And it worked.  You got what you wanted.

But would you believe, the chain of events you and your liberal/"progressive" friends willfully set in motion hasn't quite stopped yet.  Not by a long shot.  The trend you've all worked for has a lot more effects to show you.  And I suspect a lot of you will be...less than thrilled by most of those effects.

Of course a few key players knew what they were unleashing.  They'll be delighted by the effects.  For them it will be mission accomplished.


Back when I flew for a living I was an avid student of aircraft accident reports, studying every word of the radio transmissions, cockpit voice recorder transcripts and so on, to find tiny clues to doing (or not doing) things that would hopefully enable me to avoid whatever caused that crash.

The most interesting crashes were caused not by catastrophic mechanical failure but by pilots flying a perfectly good plane into the ground because they misinterpreted where they were, or the real significance of some instrument's readings.  For example, they would begin a descent at night cleared to a certain altitude but for some reason would descend through the assigned safe altitude and crash.

In reading literally thousands of transcripts, one can often identify a moment that can be described as one of  dawning awareness on the part of the flight crew, in which they begin to realize that because of their misunderstanding of the aircraft's position or situation, they now found themselves--unexpectedly--in a situation in which death was likely minutes or seconds away.

Having descended over ocean or mountains on moonless nights hundreds of times I can imagine--in vivid detail--the disoriented feeling the pilots must experience as that awareness dawns on them.

I suspect that before their lives are over Mr. Brooks and about half of his peers will experience such a dawning awareness of what they've set in motion. 

The other half will still be yelling "It's all Bush's fault!" as the plane hits the water.