And instead of designing increasingly complex weapons to kill, the nation's top scientists can focus on creating ways to improve the environment--making discoveries that can help, instead of injure, humans.

The nation's infrastructure is also in shambles. Roads, bridges, tunnels decay with each successive day. Here in Massachusetts, public works officials have said that the state faces a great infrastructure crisis.

BUT it is the area of education that has been most forgotten by Americans.

Recent surveys have shown that students find themselves unable to tell when the Civil War took place within a 50-year period. Many can not tell where their own state is on a map. Others just don't worry about school and go watch TV. The problem, however, is not the student's fault, but the fault of a society whose sole mission over the past 50 years has been to promote democracy abroad. Well, the risk of expansionary communism has been eliminated, and it is time to properly educate the students of America. Without educating our students, the United States runs the risk of turning into a second- or third-rate nation.

THE United States should never have to be in a position of global dominance again, but, by the same token, America's citizens should not allow the nation to sink into a condition where it must depend on other nations for its economic solvency.

America has fought a long and hard war for global democracy since the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04. Now the nation must turn inward and correct some of the many problems that threaten to destroy what we have fought to preserve.