Photo Credit: NYPostBy Michael Goodwin.

The official opening of the 9/11 museum brought President Obama to New York and sparked fresh reminders of the horror of that awful day. The president called the site ­“sacred” and gave a moving speech about the American spirit, saying, “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us.”

It is the right thing to say and the right place to say it. But is it true? Is the American spirit really unbreakable?

I have my doubts.

There are many examples that say our spirit is breaking if not already broken. One involves a Wall Street Journal report that, six years after the housing bubble popped and sank the economy, federal officials want to lower mortgage standards again so more people can buy houses that they can’t afford. Been there, done that would seem to be the logical response, but the idea is gaining momentum because so few people can legitimately qualify for credit that the only way to spur housing growth is to junk the standards.

The same thing is happening in schools. Americans overwhelmingly agree that our educational system, once the envy of the world, is now lagging.

The cry to challenge students spawned a movement to raise the bar through the Common Core curriculum, but it is now grinding to a halt in New York and other places. The problem: Too many students are failing the tougher tests, making teachers look bad, parents unhappy — and politicians nervous.

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia CommonsThe loneliness of American society

By Janice Shaw Crouse.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) reported in its General Social Survey (GSS) that unprecedented numbers of Americans are lonely. Published in the American Sociological Review (ASR) and authored by Miller McPhearson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears, sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona, the study featured 1,500 face-to-face interviews where more than a quarter of the respondents — one in four — said that they have no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles or triumphs. If family members are not counted, the number doubles to more than half of Americans who have no one outside their immediate family with whom they can share confidences. Sadly, the researchers noted increases in “social isolation” and “a very significant decrease in social connection to close friends and family.”

Rarely has news from an academic paper struck such a responsive nerve with the general public. These dramatic statistics from ASR parallel similar trends reported by the Beverly LaHaye Institute — that over the 40 years from 1960 to 2000 the Census Bureau had expanded its analysis of what had been a minor category. The Census Bureau categorizes the term “unrelated individuals” to designate someone who does not live in a “family group.” Sadly, we’ve seen the percentage of persons living as “unrelated individuals” almost triple, increasing from 6 to 16 percent of all people during the last 40 years. A huge majority of those classified as “unrelated individuals” (about 70 percent) lived alone.

The compelling findings about loneliness and isolation and the ramifications for American society prompted numerous publications and talk shows to focus on the prevalence of loneliness in America. It is no accident that the social interaction trend declined sharply in the mid-1960s when “doing your own thing” became vogue and “sexual freedom” separated the physical act of sex from the embrace of an emotional attachment and/or a romantic relationship. Rabbi Daniel Lapin suggests that “we are raising a generation of children who are orphans in time.” He laments that today’s generation of young people is “incapable of integrating their past and their future … [living] instinctively in an almost animal-like fashion only in the present.” He notes that it is virtually impossible, then, to connect time and space in a way that enables them to build their “present.” Thus, they wander aimlessly about without connections — physically, emotionally, or spiritually.

Rather than acknowledge family breakdown, some commentators blame the increase in social isolation on television. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam cited a dramatic increase in television watching — five percent of American households had televisions in 1950 compared with 95 percent in 1970. Now, many homes have a TV in every room. Putnam provides further reasons for the fragmentation of the family circle and disintegration of family life since the 1960s: Families have 60 percent fewer family picnics and 40 percent fewer family dinners.

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Photo Credit: APAt the end of the first Gulf War I saw something that startled me and gave me pause. More than 20 years later I can still see the image in my mind, so vivid was the impression it made.

It was June 8, 1991. America had just won a dazzling victory. We’d won a war in a hundred hours. Saddam Hussein had folded like a cheap suit and slunk out of Kuwait. The troops were coming home and the airwaves were full of joyous reunions. It was good.

Then the startling thing: There was a huge, full-scale military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington—two miles of troops, tanks, helicopters, even missiles. They marched from the Capitol past the White House, where there was a reviewing stand full of dignitaries. An F-117 stealth fighter streamed overhead.

I watched it on the news, from New York. When I saw the tanks, those big heavy bruisers, rolling down the avenue, it looked to me for all the world like a May Day parade in the Brezhnev era—militarist, nationalist, creepy. The journalist Michael Kelly captured some of the feel of it in the afterword of his book, “Martyr’s Day.” The parade was “a splendid evocation of military might and military discipline,” yet he found it “oddly disquieting.”

Disquieting was exactly the word. It was all such a rolling brag for a brief engagement we’d won with brains, guts and superior technology. More important, the size and nature of the parade seemed to suggest we were forgetting something: that war is a tragedy. People die in wars, the brave are sacrificed. War is sometimes necessary but always a mark of failure, the last bloody stop after breakdowns of diplomacy and judgment on all sides. War isn’t something you throw a fizzy party for while showing off your shining hardware.

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It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

But then what isn’t? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that “modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing”. He was musing on a press release for some or other “Day of Action” that is, as usual, a day of inaction:

Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.

It’s that easy! You go to a concert and someone “calls on government” to do something, and the world gets fixed.

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