Just a little ways back, most Americans complained loudly about potholes. Taxed to the max, we had expectation that we should get some basic services. Now our expectations are zero, and infrastructure fatigue is a given. We are collectively spent. Our economic exhaustion is resigned to accept that our best days are over. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, we have come to that realization. Once we put a man on the moon. Now we rely on the Russians to shuttle us to and from space. From medicine to education, high speed transit or high speed Internet, America trails rather than leads. A bleak picture.

Where there is a will there is a way, we used to say, but our will, waning steadily since 9/11, is now captive to political polarization and the myriad distractions of our new technological age. Our security is forever in doubt. Governance is an utter failure. We obsess on communication forms whose constant stimulation ultimately disallows real substantive community.

I sometimes frequent McDonald’s to get a cup of coffee without taking out a small loan. There lies entrance to a veritable time warp. Retirees sit about conversing table to table, recalling a pre-Internet world where one went to a cafe to socialize in person. Very infrequently I find myself in Starbucks, whose CEO recently exalted its mission to provide “a third place to go between work and home,” fostering “a sense of community worldwide.” What I encounter are customers sitting alone, electronically absorbed elsewhere, or patrons sitting together but still individually preoccupied with some e-connection. Likely, this is what some have left at work and will be coming home to — Starbucks’ vision virtually realized. When hitting a pothole on your way home, imagine the near future when cars will have computerized avoidance of such embarrassingly low tech infrastructure failures. In the meantime, road building’s heyday has come and gone and taxation can’t even trickle down sufficient funding for dangerously needed bandaids to what was America’s endless matrix of social mobility and economic growth. “Bridges to nowhere” leadership used to actually include bridges. Now, those once so adept at bringing home the pork won’t even fund federal highway projects. It used to be “America, love it or leave it.” Now it’s,“If it won’t be an America as I see it, let’s throw everything on the scrap heap.” Defunding America is an odd patriotism and hasn’t brought about much free market salvation. Defunding the top 1 percent would refund America’s wealth, but why return to what always worked?

America is desperately trying to keep its chin above water. Environmentally, that can be stated literally. Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath is emblematic of jerry-rigging an optimistic future while still keeping one’s head buried in the sand. Meanwhile, federal flood insurance is finally becoming a quite different form of denial. All our great coastal cities will eventually have to be relocated. Just imagine how successfully that will be accomplished on a shoestring.

Our “Greatest Generation,” hard-pressed by a war which ultimately provided an unstoppable economic engine, apparently never heard of sustainability. With the wealthy taxed at 91 percent, and corporations taxed higher than individuals, postwar America’s shared wealth created more and more shared opportunity. That is what built the vast infrastructure we can no longer maintain on a tax structure where the top of the economic ladder now pays 14 percent, if anything at all.

While Europe rebuilt from utter destruction, America built a dream where that would never happen to us. There was no such thing as a “bridge too far.” Our expansive highway system was married to our national defense. A transportation system dependent on countless carbon feet integrated commerce as never before. Any job you could drive to was yours to have. The trouble with any dream is the wake up call. Our unsustainable reality is repeatedly ignored as we choose to close our eyes and roll over, and over, until finally finding ourselves down looking up. Now, we must again become the little engine that could. Trouble is, at our railroad building best, we had ready and cheap immigrant labor that now we can’t abide. Before that, our economic engine ran on slavery.

If our once bountiful capitalism is to be revived, we need desperate change.

America needs to embrace the Tea Party’s and Occupy’s participatory example, however flawed, rather than retreating from representative democracy’s current dysfunction. Citizen empowerment was never an entitlement. America may feel like it’s in free fall, but its history should encourage us that its can-do spirit can be rekindled. However, first we have to show up. After winning its freedom, America chose the ideal of a “melting pot.” Now our greatest threat is from being conquered by our own division. The terrible price of that “won’t-do” spirit is finally apparent to both sides of the aisle, yet the aisle only grows wider. In a country where the bottom line is indeed the bottom line, that division no longer adds up. Ideological victory at any cost is just plain bad economics.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.