Is there a doctor (of sociology) in the house?

Convulsions. That’s the only word I can think of to describe what the United States is going through now. 

And what’s causing them? People have focused strictly on an economy that’s pumping ever more weakly, but we have a wide array of symptoms: a rapidly deteriorating skeleton of steel and concrete structures; ruined or exhausted resources and compromised defenses; an obesity of wealth aggravating a flesh-eating poverty; an educational nervous system whose synapses aren’t firing. And now a painful rash of failing newspapers, inexorably spreading. 

This last is becoming agony for us journalists, for whom every sale or closing is like losing a family member to some horrible pandemic. A story in TIME online predicts more deaths and soon.   

I can’t believe these problems are unrelated and I suspect that money is not the real root cause, though it’s certainly a factor. What we need is a differential diagnosis.

What could account for all these ills? Could it be our attitude?

Yes, I’m suggesting that the U.S. has a psychosomatic problem – and psychosomatic doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real, just that they started in our heads.

Look at where those heads have been: For decades now, Americans have been absorbed with amassing personal wealth and spending it ostentatiously, needlessly, on unwholesome toys and pursuits, from SUVs and multimillion-dollar homes to environmentally destructive industrial products and practices. Until recently, the majority of us have voted for leaders who ripped away regulations, encouraged overdevelopment, neglected schools and food safety and the health-care system, turned corporations loose on the public like strep colonies in a neonatal ward, ignored – even defied – the warning signs of a dying  planet and a sickened generation of children and kept indulging the rich while depriving the poor.

Why did we do it? Why didn’t we invest our obscene incomes in better education and medical services and more nutritious food? Why didn’t we clean up the air, water and soil and the stupid, polluting cars and industries that poisoned them in the first place? Why didn’t we insist that our leaders accomplish these things?

And why are we letting our news organizations go under?

Apparently, because we enjoy being rich and not thinking about anything but our own comfort and fun. Or because those of who weren’t rich so wanted to be that we were willing to let the wealthy do as they pleased, in hopes that one day, that would be us. Only now – irony of ironies – we are all becoming the poor and afflicted that we didn’t used to care about.

And I wonder if, at long last, we’ll change our attitudes. Electing Obama was a tremendously encouraging sign that Americans at least wanted a new economic strategy for our nation. But I’m looking for a different sign, now. The one I’m hoping to see will show that we care about more than our own wallets, that we care what’s going on in the world and demand the most accurate information about it that’s humanly possible to provide.

If the last major newspaper dies, will Americans suddenly discover that they miss the on-the-ground, eye-witness, reliably researched news they used to get from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and all the other papers that invested money from subscriptions and advertising in huge networks of skilled reporters and editors? Or will our society just blow the whole thing off and contentedly derive its impressions of the world and what’s happening in it from YouTube and the aimless minutiae of Twitter?

Americans can’t run their country without dependable daily news and news organizations can’t produce that news unless Americans are willing to pay for it.  Foreign correspondents and  Capitol Hill reporters – and all the people who make professional-quality print, radio, TV and even online news possible - represent enormous amounts of ability, training and experience. If they can’t get paid for their work, they can’t do it at all and their skills will disappear from our society. And then we will become a nation of people without a clue, unable function and ripe for takeover by whatever oppressor wants power over us.

But maybe Americans won’t say “good riddance” when the news disappears. Maybe they’ll realize they need it back. I’m waiting to see. … with the journalistic defibrillator paddles in my hands.