A Nation of Whiners and Victims

By Stephan Helgesen

It’s time to face some painful facts. We Americans have lost our edge and have gone soft. We’ve become a nation of whiners, complainers and victims that see our collective glass as half empty (if we recognize it at all). We’ve chosen to forget our past greatness and instead accuse those who sacrificed their very lives to preserve our Republic of being misguided or worse yet, as oppressors.

This attitude is not the sole province of all those ‘young people’ who seem to spend their days looking for ways to topple our economic system, do away with so-called systemic racism or stifling free speech and denying the right of others to disagree with them. No, it is multi-generational and has even infected the baby boom generation that has seemingly forgotten what their fathers did in World War II to safeguard our freedom.

Life in America has always been a work in progress. Granted, some have ridden First Class while others have served them but we’ve always beat our breasts about “upward mobility borne from equal opportunity,” and justifiably so. Most of us have come to the realization that there will always be opportunity costs associated with every opportunity — that there will be trade-offs, losses and even failures associated with every risk. That's what our country was built on — a risk and reward foundation — where those who dared to risk deserved to reap the rewards from their investments. Somewhere along the line, however, we let our pettiness get the better of us.