The Concept of “Current America” and Our Need for Hard Facts and Real Data
America is in need of responsible answers, realistic hope, and measurable progress. The solutions to America’s problems will be neither quick nor simple, but they are there. Eventually they will be built upon a certain blended bedrock of compromise and consensus, but the place to begin — the immediate goal — may be to have a clear understanding about Current America itself. We must obtain, assess, and reach a threshold consensus about the hard facts and real data about Current America — not early America at the time of its origin or as envisioned by our Founding Fathers; not nostalgia America as some Americans remember it from their youth; not even modern America of the late 20th Century which most Americans saw with their own eyes and lived through their own experiences.
Instead, we must focus upon now — the nature and condition of our country, our Current America, at it exists now.
The motivation for some of the books on which I am still and have long been working come in part from the widely shared observations (a) that America is in trouble and (b) that part of our coutnry’s problems result from the fact that Americans hold vastly different understands about our country — the nature and extent of our problems and the availability of alternative courses of action. Ignorance or disagreement about the state of our country and having no common basis in the factual reality of our circumstances causes a diminishment of our American conversation and contributes to our growing and now pervasive cynicism. It inflames the argumentativeness of our discussions, and, indirectly, to the very coarseness of our language itself. The talk shows are too ventilated and their hosts to heated. In the opinion of some, it is the self-perceived purity of both the culture wars and the rise of ideology which have allowed reason, knowledge, and facts themselves to be too readily and too frequently dismissed.
These subjects are among the topics addressed in Cutting Through the Numbers — The Hard Facts and Real Data About the State of Current America. This book is being completed as a prefatory book to The Chance of a Lifetime series and should be published and available in bookstores and on-line within the next 3-4 months — by May, 2013.
