The Actual State of the Union

I didn't watch President Obama's State of the Union address last night. I didn't read a transcript of it, and the only few snippets of its content I saw were from Twitter. I didn't care to hear or read it because I knew exactly what it would be: yet another political speech about how great America is and how great everything's going and how many things that actually aren't so great will be fixed somehow. It's a pretty meaningless endeavor.

I mean, really, what else is the President going to say? He isn't going to say that he failed in any area, or that his policies need to change, or that some problems are unsolvable. He has nothing to gain from honesty, at least in our political system. No President does. Honest appraisal isn't even close to being the top priority in a speech like this.

Nonetheless, the name of this particular speech would appear to require some kind of analysis of where our country really stands. Because it doesn't seem to be part of the President's job to actually do this, I humbly offer my own take on the status of the United States of America going into 2015.

This country is, I believe, in the midst of an ideological crisis. The United States was founded on principles of liberty. Over its 238-and-counting years of existence, the nation has struggled to walk the line between ordered liberty and licentiousness. How much freedom can be allowed without chaos? How much control can be wielded without tyranny? How much immorality can be permitted without a whole people losing morality entirely?

Never have these questions been more relevant since the founding era than today. Our modern nation struggles against itself. We have leaders who want guns only in the hands of police, but don't know how to prevent police from abusing authority. We have social activists who want government "out of the bedroom," yet want that same government to define what "consensual sex" is. We have an executive branch that wants to end terrorism without calling it that, fight wars that aren't wars, use the combined arms of social media trends and Predator drones to fight barbarism, and tell other powers what they can and can't do without saying what they do is wrong.

America, you need to decide what you are.

Are you going to be a country based on something, or based on nothing? Will you be a rock that weathers winds of change, or a kite that blows along with them? Are you going to be a state that controls people, or one that urges them to control themselves? Are you going to be the policeman of the world, or the sleeping giant that leaves things alone until provoked? Are you going to be the arbiter of morality, or the reflection of it?

Right now, we're trying to have it both ways. We can't keep doing this. It doesn't work. All we've succeeded in doing is making economic, foreign, social, and law enforcement policy more muddied, more complicated, more frustrating, more broken. No one knows what the rules are. No one knows who even makes the rules. It's a mess.

That's the real state our union is in. We're not only going in the wrong direction, we can't decide which wrong direction to go. If this keeps up, I predict disaster, not only for the conservatives who object, but for the progressives who have been steering the ship all this time.

I wonder if any politicians realize this. Even they do, I don't think they'd admit it. Certainly not in a speech on television.