Has American get-up-and-go got up and gone?

Randi Kreiss

We Americans know some things about ourselves. It’s part of our narrative. We are winners. We are optimists. We have a “can do” attitude that allows us to smite our enemies and solve our problems. We invent things, fix things and help others. We are smart as hell and we don’t take nothin’ from nobody.

If you don’t believe me, just watch any World War II movie. We are the people who get it done. However, in view of recent history, including the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I decided to probe further into the long-held belief in American know-how.

I started with my dad, who’s 91 but was a young man during the Second World War. I asked him if he and his friends and the people they knew ever wondered if America could lose the war. After all, it went on for years, and an entire generation of boys was swept off the streets and into the armed services. Children were born who didn’t see their fathers for two or three years.

The Germans and Japanese were formidable and, at times, terrifying enemies.
When I asked my dad if he ever thought America could be defeated, he seemed shocked. “Never,” he said. “We felt America was invincible. ... Hitler had to be stopped and we knew we would do the job.” The fight was a long, furious effort of men and women who served overseas and millions at home who sacrificed.

Decades later, as a nation, we had the guts to seek the glory of going to the moon. As a people, we built things like the twin towers, cars with huge fins, soaring bridges and roads that gave us mobility and freedom. Our faith in ourselves was such that we challenged nature, altering the course of great rivers and erecting monumental dams to create power to drive our machines and light our cities.

Now we seem hobbled in some way. We have become reactive rather than proactive. As a people, we seem to have a chronic failure of imagination. Rather than foreseeing and avoiding problems, we are in the business of doing patches and fixes and cleanups.