McMahon: Concerned about faith

I'm getting concerned about my country. No, I'm not ready to demonstrate at a tea party. I'd rather just sip a cup of green and relax.

My uncertainty about the future of America doesn't focus on whether a health care plan can make an entire nation ill. Switzerland and Australia seem to operate fairly well with theirs.

Nor am I worried that Karl Marx has replaced Groucho in the President's Library. My anxiety is the same as that expressed by New York Times columnist David Brooks last week. We've lost some of our faith & China has found it.

Oh, we're still a spiritually faithful country, but I continue to fear that we've lost faith in ourselves. It's vulnerability, a weakness I've never observed before. And China, in particular, even with a billion and a third people to feed, seems to have discovered what was almost an exclusive property of ours - an abiding faith in the future.

That's how Edison, Bell, the Wright Brothers and our space explorers forged irrationally ahead. I want my America to savagely take on the hard problems & solve them. I want my America to passionately believe in tomorrow.