You Talk Too Much!

Notice how many talk shows there are on TV? On the radio? We Americans have replaced real deeds with talk of real deeds. For instance: the more our teachers talk about "excellence in education", the less excellence one finds in schools. The more our politicians talk about accountability, the less accountable and more corrupt they become.
Talk has become a substitute for action. And it's not even interesting or inspiring speech that emanates from the "talking heads".
When action does come, it comes across as hysterical overreaction and overkill: laying waste to a Third-World country that couldn't even occupy one of our inner-city neighborhoods if it tried (do we really feel like conquerors...and our pathetic excuses for leaders imagine themselves to be in the mold of Alexander the Great or Frederick of Prussia?); sending a 400-plus-strong SWAT team of FBI and BATF agents to "take down" Randy Weaver and his family, killing his unarmed wife, dog and wounding his teenaged son; massacreing religious isolationists and innocents at Waco, Texas.
It's also reflected in our shift from a manufacturing/farming/mining/shipping/timber economy to a "service" economy. We don't make things anymore, instead we serve...people who do? No, it's all been outsourced, offshored.
A "service" economy presupposes that there are doers, makers, inventors who produce tangible goods that people are willing to spend money on. I recall an article about the threatened closing of a car plant near my house. The report highlighted...who? The people on the assembly line soon to be idled? The foremen? No, it was the waitresses in the nearby restaurants where the auto workers went for lunch every day; the strip malls and surrounding stores where the plant workers did their shopping. Because the car plant produced something tangible, something useful, something that would enable other people to be themselves more productive, all manner of "services" had sprung up around it. But once the assembly line is shut down, the plant shuttered and rusting, all those "service" industries will wither and die. There have to be producers for the service "industry" to serve.
Will we continue to be a world power -- swaggering around the globe pounding tinpot dictatorships into dust -- when we no longer make things, like our soldiers' uniforms, the weapons systems they wield, the troop transports, ships and jeeps? What do we do when China -- as in "Made In" -- declares war on us and we have already surrendered all our manufacturing to them?