Prosperity

As I was riding my bicycle this morning, I thought about all of the beautiful houses in the neighborhood that had been built since the 1960s.  America has experienced sixty years of unbroken prosperity, such as the world has never seen.  Americans have come to believe that prosperity is their birthright, that they are entitled to it as a matter of course.  The great wealth of this country is the result of several centuries of hard work by people who believed in the “Protestant Work Ethic.”  Previous generations labored long and hard, in the belief that God would prosper their honest toil.  That work ethic has now been lost.  It has been replaced by a generation of Americans who believe they are entitled to prosperity, regardless of how they live.  The work ethic that was the foundation of our nation’s wealth is a thing of the past, and the present genearation is squandering the moral and economic legacy it inherited.  The truly sad thing is that our nation no longer has the moral strength to make the hard choices that could reverse this decline.