Time to Reboot America

Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times columnist and author of numerous best selling books, has a great column today, Christmas Eve. The headline:

Time to Reboot America

He makes a strong case – so strong, so urgent, I want to quote liberally from it:

“We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

“To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

“For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

“That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.”

Friedman is not the only national figure calling for rebooting America. Almost every day someone in government or business or society at large is calling for the reinvention of our country, or some huge part of it, on a scale not seen in decades, maybe ever.

For such a rebooting to happen, I think we need much more than government bailouts and stimulus packages. We need for people by the thousands and millions, at every age and in every walk of life, to face up to and overcome the hard times by rebooting themselves and their organizations – their governments, schools, companies, churches, civic and charitable organizations.

Remember that the term “rebooting” and its counterpart “booting” were adapted for computer talk from “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.” It is time for some major pulling up on our own bootstraps. We collectively got ourselves into this mess. We collectively need to get ourselves out of it.

It is the challenge and the opportunity of our lifetimes.