Skip to footer

Beyond the 'fiscal cliff': 6 reasons to be optimistic about America's future

As Americans take stock of 2012 and gear up for 2013, it's tempting to adopt "decline think" about the country, especially since there is still no deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" of steep budget cuts and tax increases. But here are six reasons Americans should still be optimistic about their future.

2. The 'good old days' weren't so good

The assessment of American decline is not as persuasive as it might appear, depending, as it does, on the "good old days" being as rosy as many people recall. At least in foreign policy, the US is often said to have achieved "hegemony" – having its way – after World War II, only to have become impotent in recent years. But this alleged period of postwar dominance was rife with strategic setbacks. Among them:

The emergence of seven additional nuclear-weapons states between 1945 and 2000 (Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Israel, and Pakistan); a series of strategic crises (the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962); the costly and protracted war in Vietnam and beyond that ended in US defeat and the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 that contributed to US stagflation; and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

2 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.