Post I of III: The national watchwords need to be repair, rebuild and return our country to greatness and in the meanwhile keep it together.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

We're at the clean start of a new decade, and it wouldn't be bad if the national watchwords were repair, rebuild and return, with an eye toward what is now our central project, though we haven't fully noticed, and that is keeping our country together. So many forces exist to tear us apart. We have to do what we can to hold together in the long run.

You . . . can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being.

Congress forgot the mission, or rather continued more than ever to seem to have forgotten the mission. They weren't there to legislate with a long view, they were there to be re-elected and help the team, the red one or the blue one. This is not a new story, only a worsened one.

[T]urning around institutions is a huge, long and uphill fight. It probably begins with taking the one thing we all hate to take in our society, and that is personal responsibility.