America lacks vision, leadership

Fredrick Wilkening, Las Vegas

Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013 | 2:02 a.m.

I recently read an article that questioned whether President Obama should again lead America down a well-traveled path toward another war in the Middle East. The article gave me pause; we as a country have been down this road. We have put our young men and women in harm’s way, but we have not learned the lesson.

Take a minute and think about everything you have recently heard or read about the demise of Detroit. It makes me wonder about the direction our country has taken over the past 70 years. Sixty-nine years ago, America dropped two atomic bombs on cities in our wartime enemy, Japan.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, laid to waste for centuries to come due to radiation. Detroit, on the other hand, was an example of America at its best, a hub of commerce and an example of what the American dream was all about. Seventy years later, it is the city of Detroit that is laid to waste and in some respects represents the tip of the iceberg because the things that are going wrong within America are too many to mention. They include education, health care and social services.

America needs vision and leadership in all phases of government, and sadly in today’s political atmosphere, we have neither from either party. James Ogburn once wrote that a democracy historically has a life span of about 200 years. Has anyone seen recent pictures of Japan’s two major cities lately?