LINDA'S TAKE: Fools ignore lessons from the grave

It does seem that we are in a foolish time. We've lost grip on our beloved country.

We have, haven't we?

America's financial houses are collapsing, service and infrastructures are buckling, terrorists taunt and the country's self-image titers.

Where do we go from here?

We need the very best leadership, but one wonders if the best has already lived and only speaks from the dust. Certainly, brilliant minds are birthed in every generation, but we cannot count on fate to call them together when we need them. It feels like this is one of those needy times. Where are the defenders?

Have you seen John Adams? It's an HBO special with Tom Hanks as the executive producer. Rich in history lessons, the seven-part miniseries runs Sunday nights. It gives meaning to patriot Thomas Paine's admonition that freedom and liberty must be earned and the rougher the road the more cherished are the results.

The show was created from biographer David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, reviewed as "one of the best selling American history biographies of all time." The account is non-partisan. It speaks loudly to all who care about our current crisis.

Some believe, as I do, that it was no accident men of incredible selflessness were assembled as one. It's vitally important to note that what can be considered the most pivotal time in history came when, as Hanks said, "When it was hard to be alive."

Yet they were diligent visionaries, courageous beyond understanding, who chose independence, which instantly put a price on their heads. Had the revolution been lost, England would surely have put them to death.

They were young men: Thomas Jefferson, age 33, who actually wrote the Declaration of Independence - the major portion of the document anyway - and Adams, a spirited 40-year-old. And, of course, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, among others.

Where are these men in today's world? Perhaps media, money and brokering have fiddled with destiny too much.

Hang onto this: The youth of today will clean house when the bell tolls their day. They always have, just as they did in 1776.

There are those who sense and lead. Again, I refer to the book The Fourth Turning to learn from ashes and graves and history, www.fourthturning.com. Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe dug so deeply they found that each "saeculum," or century of time, is divided four ways into a high point of strength, then an awakening, an unraveling and, then, crisis.

They tell us America has entered a point of crisis, a fourth turning and secular upheaval, a time of replacement of the old civic order with a new one. That means what is happening is predictable. It follows a rhythm of generations. Note that the Revolutionary War was a "Fourth Turning."

One has to wonder if we'll once again be required to win independence and fight for basic rights, those same ones which were pounded out in the stuffy closed chambers of the Continental Congress. And, if we must, who will risk everything to do it right? Which of our citizens and, tragically, leaders will betray us? There's no sense of comfort or confidence from the media candidates; none from the White House or Congress. It feels as if they're more in it for themselves. Perhaps, in the end, it will be left to the self determination of individual states.

I wonder what the founding fathers would do with America today?

Linda Turley-Hansen is a syndicated columnist and former veteran Phoenix television news anchorwoman who lives in the East Valley. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached by e-mail at letters@lindastake.com.