Have Whine, Won’t Travel
Matt Sanchez, embedded in Iraq, wants to know “when the American public went from being the can-doers to the will-whiners:”
… Something was definitely different between wartime Americans deployed overseas and peacetime Americans hunkered down in the United States. And then it struck me, like the game show contestant who beats his opponents to the buzzer, what was missing from the time I left the United States, only a week before, was the sense of despair, frustration and self-centered complaining.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:43 am on Tuesday, June 19, 2007
One Response to “Have Whine, Won’t Travel”
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June 19th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
There are those who complain no matter what, and I agree that the present culture isn’t conducive to a proper appreciation of the luxuries that make life good (or what it takes to produce such a life), but I think much of the fault of the phenomenon the article points out lie with the chattering and political classes in this country. It is they who form the conversation, the quality of the conversation, and the results of the conversation. People can only operate on the information they have.
It is also they who do the diagnosis. I think there are many people who would do more than complain, but their ability to do so is limited, and the complaints that do not jive with the given diagnosis are not heard, but are dismissed out of hand.