Happy Birthday, USA!  Have your cake and eat it, too. So often we're told we can't.  And the older we get, the less we look forward to birthdays in which our cake-eating is limited and we find ourselves one year closer to death. 

Is this what has happened to America?  Have we filled up with too many sweets, finding ourselves past our prime and one year closer to our collective end? 

Have the glory days passed us by as we watch the rise of younger nations like China and India that are culturally much older, but politically much younger?  In fact, at 232, we are the oldest nation existing under the same governmental system. 

Is it time for us to bake that cake with foreign wheat, to forego our manufacturing dominance, and to relinquish our economic influence to OPEC and oil-rich Russia or the nations with stronger currency?

Despite the collapse of communism, our foreign policy since the 1960s shows signs of a stumbling giant.  With nearly 4200 dead in Iraq, a tenacious enemy in Afghanistan, and no end in sight, is America's reign as the preeminent world policy leader coming to an end as well? 

Like a middle aged man after a painful surgery, distraught because he's finding it difficult to carry himself like he is used to, we are facing mortality head on.  We may question our recent accomplishments the way the man might view a seemingly insignificant promotion.  We wonder about our failures the way he laments his children's lack of noteworthy achievements.  As he watches others pull ahead, we too wonder if ever again we will achieve anything great. 

What was the beginning of the end?  Was it Vietnam?  A breakdown of moral consensus in the 1960s?  Or was it spurts of prosperity that led us away from hard work and building families to immediate pleasures and materialism? 

Maybe if the old man looks at his life a little differently the failures aren't what they seem. 

The biggest crush to American morale in the late 20th century was losing Vietnam.  But did 50,000 + soldiers over an 11 year period truly die in vain? 

Beyond the pretense that sparked the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, we went into Vietnam to prevent the "domino theory" from running its course throughout Asia.  Stop communism in Vietnam and you keep it from spreading to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, etc. 

In 1975, U.S. soldiers lowered their heads, feeling that the mission had failed.  But was this really true?  While Western powers saw Vietnam and Cambodia as two more dominoes that had fallen, they did not realize then that these would be the last pieces to fall in Asia.

You see, the lesson for leftist intellectuals and lukewarm Communists in Southeast Asia and the Pacific was that communism would triumph after decades of killing or after a short, devastating bloodbath.

Either way, over a million would die and millions more would suffer.

Only few die-hard Marxists believed the sacrifice would be justified.

So after 33 years, no Communist revolutions  have been staged on Asian soil. 

Civil unrest during the Civil Rights struggles brought us the derision of Western nations that saw a racist America reaping an unpleasant harvest from slavery and years of discrimination.

But today, we stand as the first Western nation -- perhaps the first modern country -- to launch a serious contender to its executive leadership from a traditionally underprivileged ethnic group.  In fact, how many once critical European nations have ANY ethnic minorities even in their legislatures? 

 Clearly the Iraq strategy has been problematic and expensive.  But how much is it worth to us to have lived almost 7 years without further attacks on U.S. soil, or to have dozens of military bases in an Arab nation, or to have positioned ourselves so well to dismantle terrorist operations throughout the Middle East? 

Has the economy been worse in the last 40 years?  Yes!  Did we not pull through the 1970s malaise to re-emerge as the leader, once again, in vital technology and world affairs?  Will we do it again?  Of course!

Perhaps the aches and pains are temporary and that child who didn't become a doctor has nonetheless become a good person and an inspiration to others.  And maybe we're not as old as we thought. 

God bless America!

Terry Harlin is a public school history teacher in Georgia, originally from Lithia Springs.