Farmers have known for a long time that you should never ever eat your seed corn.
When the food starts to run out, when hunger pangs get stronger, there is a temptation to reach back into the pantry and start eating the corn that was held back to plant in the spring for the next crop.
But if you do that, even in part, you start yourself on a downhill slide that is difficult to reverse.
Eventually, you will starve.
It’s when I consider the example of eating the seed corn that I find it impossible that more people don’t see our nation is in a state of decline. We Americans have been eating our seed corn for so long — both literally and figuratively — that we are both fat and starving at the same time.
Look at our infrastructure, collapsing around us. That’s part of the seed corn of our society, but we have been spending trillions of dollars in military adventures around the world while failing to keep up our roads and bridges.
Look at our culture. Culture is how we pass on our values from one generation to the next, and in many way’s it’s our moral seed corn. Yet instead of using our culture to build strong, confident children who become strong, confident adults, we’re feeding our children the moral equivalent of excrement.
You don’t think we’re in decline?
Look at all the cities that are dying.
Look at all the states that are overwhelmed with debt.
Look at our federal government, where it doesn’t matter which party is running things because the party on the outside spends all its time preventing the one on the inside from governing.
And it doesn’t really matter anyway, because one way or another, both parties are all about eating the seed corn.
What we desperately need is a leader who will tell us the truth, that we are no longer the hardest working people in the world, that we are fat and lazy and many of us betray our ideals on a daily basis.
What do we do better than anyone else in the world?
We eat.
We consume.
Face it, that’s what “consume” in “consumer society” means. To devour, to use up, to eat. We are the consumingest people who have ever lived, and the last thing we want to be told is that we can still save ourselves, but we’ve got to get back to basics and be Americans again.
Right now we’re Romans, from the middle of the decline-and-fall period. We’ve got the best bread and the damnedest circuses humanity has ever known, and any leader who tells us we’ve got to give it up — an American Churchill, for example — and give out blood, sweat, toil and tears to get back to where we once were, well, that leader isn’t getting too many votes.
It’s a shame, because I really think it’s not too late. Rome took four hundred years to fall, and we still have some tremendous God-given advantages.
But until we get serious about being Americans again, all we’re doing is eating our seed corn — and hastening our own demise.