America at the Crossroads

One hundred years from now, I think historians will look back at America and struggle to understand the choices our leaders made. If America is not a great nation in 2110, I believe that historians will decide that the Great Recession was the beginning of the end of America as the world's superpower.
They will look back and wonder why America would conduct two costly wars simultaneously without raising taxes to pay for them. They will look at Afghanistan and wonder what America was fighting for. The Taliban will be but a footnote and the mountains of that landlocked country will look much the same as they have for centuries.
Historians will look back in puzzlement at the optimism that greeted the election of America's first black president and wonder how that optimism so quickly faded, laid to rest by war, recession and resolute opposition from the Republican Party.
They will look back at December, 2010 and struggle to understand the current debate in Washington over unemployment benefits and tax cuts. With millions of Americans without jobs or hope, the Congress refused to provide assistance to the poorest Americans while doling out tax cuts to the very wealthiest Americans. They will see that Wall Street bankers provided themselves millions in bonuses only months after taking government bailout funds and wonder how it could happen.
Future historians will marvel that America erected a wall along its southern border to prevent Mexicans from illegally entering the country. In a nation starving for jobs, this wave of "illegals" were vilified for taking American jobs while the corporate titans were rewarded for outsourcing millions of jobs to places like India, China and Brazil, the new powers in the period of American decline.