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Noonan: Don't Panic, We're Still America

From Madoff to Detroit, people feel it's all collapsing, and they're wrong

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Dec 19, 2008 9:46 AM CST

(Newser) – From Bernard Madoff to Rod Blagojevich, Americans have lost faith in the people running things. “It’s the age of the empty suit,” one of Peggy Noonan’s friends mused recently. Our institutions have proven impotent and absent, and now “people feel all trends lead downward from here, that the great days of America Rising are over,” Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal. “It is so non-American, so unlike us.” It’s time to remember why this nation is great.

We remain the world’s longest-running democracy, governed by an unshakeable constitution. We have the world’s biggest, most technologically powerful economy. People flock from everywhere to our hospitals and universities. “The point is not to say rah-rah, paint our faces blue and bray ‘We’re No. 1,’” Noonan writes. It’s to remember that there is reason to hope, even in these dark days, for “the return of the suit inhabited by a person.”

[Images (2)]

[Quotes (2)]

Volunteers hold a large American flag as they prepare for a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008 at Bicentennial Park in Miami. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. stands in front of an Ohio State flag as he speaks at a rally in front of the Ross County Courthouse in Chillicothe, Ohio, Oct. 10, 2008. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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The point is not to say rah-rah, paint our faces blue and bray 'We're No. 1.' The point is that while terrible challenges face us we are building from an extraordinary, brilliant and enduring base. - Peggy Noonan

People feel all trends lead downward from here, that the great days of America Rising are over, that the best is not yet to come but has already been.
- Peggy Noonan

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Noonan: Don't Panic, We're Still America