Ask What the Country can do for You!

It has been nearly 50 years since President Kennedy enunciated the famous words "Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for the country." Kennedy was outdated & nostalgic for an America that no longer was. Indeed, within 10 years of that famous speech minorities & women demanded the country do more for them! The counterculturists demanded the country change. So much for what you can do for the country.
Historically, modern United States surely was formed by people who were fleeing their own country, due to reasons ranging from political or religious persecution to famines & poverty for a second chance, a better life. All they could ask for was an opportunity; America owed them nothing more. They worked hard, the country needed to be built - roads, factories, houses, an army (& to some extent that is the basis for America's anti-academic & anti-intellectual orientation; unlike the established civilizations of Europe & Asia wih a privileged educated class, America couldn't be built by discussing Shakespearian drama or the Periodic Table but by people who built, invented, repaired, grew crops, hunted or fought. But that's the subject for another blog).
By the 1960s, however, that had changed. The younger generation had grown up in the prosperity of the postwar era. They couldn't care less how their parents or grandparents suffered in the Old Country. They were born & brought up in America, this was their country, and they had expectations from it.
And so America matured. And the population of America is no longer a selective group of entrepreneurial, adventurous, industrious immigrants glad to get a second chance, but rather similar to populations of other countries, most people are average. And in the age of globalization, the average American will lose when it comes to employability not only compared to the above average from say most other countries, but even to the average, since it is cheaper to hire an employee in India, Phillipines or Malaysia than in America. The average citizen of most other countries are less threatened because outsourcing in not that common & there are legal restrictions as well. While American companies definitely benefit from being able to hire the best &/or cheapest around the world, the loser in this equation is the American Middle Class. Money trickles down from profit-making American companies to China & India. The benefit to multinational corporate America is now divorced from benefit to the American Middle Class.
For a long time & even now it is very unfashionable for Americans to ask the Government for economic protection. That is socialism, isn't it!? In addition, the corporate-media complex colluded to propagate this idea that one should be happy & thankful to be American, no complaints entertained. Here, see these hellish pictures from Indian slums! Read these reports of the horrors of Chinese Communism! And if that didn't work, just Do Not Think. Here's the show for that:-A Show About Nothing! Yadda Yadda Yadda. The perfect formula to keep the population empty-brained! Doesn't woek anymore. To the New Generation, India & China are the countries their jobs are going to. It may be time to ask what the country can do to protect Americans from the onslaught of globalization & outsourcing/importing of jobs. Maybe, the time has come to recognize no country is the land of unlimited opportunity, and the rules of the 18th, 19th & even 20th Century don't apply to the 21st century anymore.