Ellen Bueno: Being a patriot takes hard work

It’s complicated being a patriot these days — more complicated than it was for the generation that lived through the World Wars. For them, the bad guys were "over there." They fought our enemies abroad and won. It was easy to have faith in the greatness of the United States.

Their children grew up and lost a bit of that faith when the Johnson administration lied about what they were doing in Vietnam, and when the Nixon administration tried to bug the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. For the flower children, the bad guys were over here.

Now we’ve got bad guys everywhere. Over there we’ve got terrorists. Over here we’ve got terrorists and careless lenders who caused the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting recession. And within the government we’ve got watchdog agencies that are supposed to spot bombers and bad bankers — but have failed.

We still believe in the greatness of our nation, but realize keeping it great requires vigilance. Like the family car, parts of it will break down and it’s up to us to keep it in good repair.

So the government agencies and committees monitoring our national security and economic health need fixing. Between the two, Americans are right to be angrier with the people who are supposed to be watching over our economy. It’s hard to spot every single suicide bomber with new tricks up his sleeve or underwear. But somebody should have seen the confluence of events leading up to the failure of our financial institutions. That’s what we’re paying them to do. But they failed to notice the captains of industry steering our nation into a financial iceberg, and as a result one-quarter of our net worth disappeared in a matter of months.

Lawmakers now plan to re-regulate the banks in hopes of preventing future failures, but it would be better if they steered us away from disasters rather than reacting to them after they’ve happened. In fact, they will have no excuse if they don’t steer us away from the next iceberg because it has been in clear view for years.

Our $14 trillion federal debt is going to crush us if Congress doesn’t quit spending more money than it takes in. For more than 40 years it has indulged in deficit spending, pretending a day of reckoning would never arrive. But that day is just around the corner and it’s going to be financially painful enough as it is. It’s our patriotic duty to insist Congress not allow this problem to get worse.

Having said that, it’s important to be realistic about the government. It’s an institution composed of flawed human beings. It will never be perfect, nor is it supposed to save us from all our personal problems. That would be to confuse the government with God. (Some people do.) A realistic goal for us as patriots is to keep trying to make our government a little better than it was before.

Of course the best way to do this is to vote better people into office. But it takes work to figure out who the best candidates are. We need to read about and understand the issues in order to judge whether a candidate has honest and realistic positions on those issues. We can’t afford to be swayed by grandiose but vague campaign promises any more. We need to be able to discern real solutions from hot air.

One way to do this is to press politicians for specifics. We need to ask "how" more often than "what." Anyone can promise to reduce deficit spending. We need to know how he’d really do it. President Obama recently promised to boost the economy by doubling our exports over the next two years. Sounds great. How will he do it?

The burden really is on us to maintain the greatness of our nation. Greatness comes from the ground up, from good people who steer their representatives in the right direction. As patriots we must pay attention, dig for the truth and write letters letting our representatives know we’re watching them after the elections are over. Being a patriot takes work but we know our country is worth the effort.

Ellen Bueno has lived in Baraboo for 22 years and is the reader member of the News Republic’s editorial board.