Women’s rights. Gay rights. Black lives matter. Right to grow, smoke, and sell our own pot. Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. As Americans we love our rights, now our taskmasters. Dependence on government handouts, Internet porn, no-fault divorce, endless litigation, and police-the-world politicians with pat answers yet few solutions are just more rain-less clouds in a prolonged drought.

Now we have Trump and Hillary as leading candidates. We also have a media that has everyone under investigation, except themselves. Nations that are caustically divisive implode. Nations that are egocentric decay. America is divisive and egocentric. America is decaying and imploding. Why? Because the total sum of our parts (proud nationalism) has become far less important than our obsessive individualism. A nation that divides itself into 300 million parts (people) has no cohesive purpose except “self-serve.”

Companies have mission statements; churches have doctrinal statements; and doctors have the Hippocratic Oath. Can anyone state America’s national vision? When was the last time we were united, on the same page, collectively concerned for the country’s welfare, 9/11? How can we be the most tolerant, yet most offended/divided nation in the world?

The way forward? Go back! What made the United States great (not perfect) to begin with? In the decade I was born in (the 1950s) our country emphatically embraced faith and family, hard work and character building, and pride in one’s own gender. External plumbing meant you were a male, internal plumbing … female. Feelings weren’t the driving force, they were the caboose, with responsibility as the engine; do right, feel right!

Women’s rights were alive and well in the 1950s and they chose marriage and having babies. Why? Because family life was celebrated, not merely tolerated. I wonder how many millions of kids from America’s broken homes today would love to have a two-parent household again.

Stability in the 1950s, like morality, was not the exception, it was the rule, and it served our country well, except in the deep South where the racism stronghold had not yet been dismantled. The country was anxious to recover from a Great Depression and two wars, and under President Eisenhower we were safe and prosperous. The interstate highway system was started. The suburbs grew exponentially, as did the use of modern appliances. Our fathers and grandfathers could stay with the same company until retirement. Sentimentality aside, we still had our shortcomings.

Besides regular trips to Disneyland (after its 1955 opening), we learned the value of self-exhilaration; bike rides to the beach, catching tadpoles in the drainage ditch, forts in the field, pennies on the railroad tracks, and bale castles in farmer John’s barn. We owned the playground and baseball diamond, nary a fat kid in the bunch. If something foul came out of our mouths a bar of soap went in. The rod was not spared, many children saved. Serious school offenses, the principal’s paddle! Classroom distraction … Bazooka bubble gum! The disruption of piercings, tattoos, thongs, Mohawks, cell phones, or guns were nowhere to be found, go figure.

Those of us, blessed to be from that era, have something to compare our contemporary America to — frogs slowly warmed to a boil. The life of the tree is in its roots. America needs to go back to its roots; to glean the good of our past 400 years, toss the chaff. From the womb of our inception (1607 Jamestown) to the grace of our shaping (1620 Plymouth Rock), to the birth of our freedom (1776 Philadelphia) the secret of America’s future success has already been documented in her rich historical past. Laws change, fundamental truths do not. America’s return to the truth will both unite and set her free!

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Dan Cooper is a Post Falls resident