America is the greatest country in the world.

America is the greatest country in the world. We’ve all heard it and as we stand in our presumed strength and vainly chant away, the sand beneath our feet is washing away. As our country continues down it’s ill-fated path of left vs. right politics, facts become mere assumptions and views and opinions become coerced, manipulated and easily swayed by 30 second flashes of pretty on our TV’s. Our understanding of the real world around us becomes less and less truthful and we all become more and more blind to how our country is actually performing. The truth is real and undeniable, America is not the greatest country in the world anymore and no amount of misrepresented information is going to save it. It’s time we all start to question our sources, open our eyes and pay attention to what’s really true.

So, before anyone starts ranting on with ignorant beliefs in propagated imitational “facts”, here are a few actual facts from some very respectable sources: America leads the world in only 4 categories, death by violence, incarceration, child poverty, and defense spending (https://www.cia.gov/library); where our lead isn’t by a little but by the next 10 countries combined (http://comtrade.un.org/pb/). We rank 12th in reading literacy, 25th in mathematical comprehension, 20th in scientific understanding (http://www.oecd.org/statistics/), 51st in life expectancy, 5th in median household income and 3rd in exports (http://data.worldbank.org/). The facts speak for themselves, the only thing we lead is in everything we shouldn’t.

Today, we find ourselves a part of the most misinformed public ever and the problem is, we simply don’t care. The advent of technology has been astronomical in advancing our race, but it has stifled us from the learning’s of work ethic and how it applies to information. News feeds and shared articles on your Facebook have become the primary source for daily event/news consumption and most to all of them are wrong. Information passes through our hands at an alarming rate and the things we pick to read are often bias, corrupted and manipulative. Facts and truths have become shadowed by popular vote, blind followings, lackadaisical behaviors and deliberate erroneous prioritization of our attention spans.

Education is failing and could be credited as the root of the problem. As schools cut budgets, curriculum is trimmed to the bare essentials in pursuit of tailoring to approximate the best outcome on standardized testing. Creative and explorative thinking is stifled, keeping our youths from venturing into innovation, invention and cultivation of curiosities we’ve all had as young children. Declarative skepticism of information once passed on by educational role models are being replaced with cost effective autonomy of regurgitation. Children are set in front of screens, soaking up reality baboons teaching morality and ethical character are second to fame and fortune. Through all of this, we’re left with uneducated, misinformed and misguided citizens.

There isn’t one problem that needs an answer. There isn’t just one solution to the many problems, the issues we’re facing today are multi-pronged and spread out among millions of individuals. We will never get back to being the greatest country in the world by promoting the wrong information; by being misinformed we’ll never aspire to greatness and without true character we can never say we belong there. If we want to see our country the way it once was, we have to promote the very basics of humanity that got us there. Teaching foundational creativity, skepticism to information and individual strength and confidence to constantly question and instill the work ethic to pursue it. We must look at ourselves; we can’t do this with only policy and rules and if we do not aspire ourselves, we cannot expect our children and others to either. Change in America today is cultivated by changing ourselves as individuals and setting an example to others.

We are no longer arguing the facts of America’s stance in the world. We are looking at ourselves as a sole country and when you remove the star spangled rosy glasses we’re all wearing, you can easily see we are failing. We are failing each other, our children and the world. Somewhere along the path of time, our country became more about profiteering and global dominance than a country for the rest of the world to look up to. We’ve allowed our leaders to blind us with twisted messages of goodness, while they use violence to intimidate and control the world in an effort to further our corrupted financial and political agendas.

That said, I don’t believe we as a public allow this with direct intention. I do believe we have been so busy in the redundancies of our fast moving world, that we do not allow ourselves to pause long enough to see through the smokescreen lie of “liberty and justice for all”. I also believe that as of today, we have ignored the ringing telephone so much, we are now afraid to answer it. The ethical debt we have placed ourselves in is so large it’s no longer about ignoring it, but running from it; an irrational idea that if we don’t address it and leave it in the hands of those that created it, it will resolve itself. But, it’s not just our nation as a whole that is failing. We are failing each other, for as long as we walk down this path of ignorance we continue to individualize our corruption; giving no example to those around us and setting no aspiration for the masses as a whole to follow something more than dress sizes and Kardashian drama.

Yes, our country is no longer the greatest country in the world; but what’s worse and what we all should be thinking about: we are no longer the greatest people of the world and everyone but us, knows it.

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“Data | The World Bank.” Data | The World Bank. N.p., 01 Oct. 2012. Web. 06 Oct. 2013.

“Central Intelligence Agency.” The World Factbook. N.p., 04 Feb. 2013. Web. 06 Oct.

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Trade Statistics Publication. N.p., 01 Oct. 2013. Web. 06 Oct. 2013.

“http://www.oecd.org/statistics/”. Publication no. 2009. NTIS No. 298332. N.p., 10 July