It hasn’t been the greatest week for our country, has it?

Those who look toward fairness and decency as a sign of our country’s health may feel concerned or disappointed.

I don’t know about you, but I thought the Super Bowl halftime show was degrading to women. It seems to me that progressives are always screaming about objectifying women, and then the Hollywood-created halftime show featured stripper poles and tawdry dancing and half-clad women.

How was that performance not objectifying women? Aren’t we in the middle of the Harvey Weinstein trial?

Most people I know left the room, including my husband, and people with children in the house. Don’t tell me that the NFL doesn’t know the Super Bowl is a family event for a lot of Americans, but the NFL is best friends with Hollywood and Hollywood is intent on producing material that lacks any meaning, or that is educational, or inspiring.

This is what you get for entertainment nowadays. Decency left the room a long time ago, and your opinion or your preferences no longer count.

Walter E. Williams is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and he was on the Mark Levine show following the Super Bowl Sunday night. He’s a man I deeply respect. An African-American who has a keen eye on the ethos of America and one who is able to view events from many different perspectives. He wasn’t very encouraging about the state of our country.

“We’re losing our liberty,” he said. “And if you ask the question, which way are we moving in tiny steps at a time … are we moving towards more personal liberty, or toward more government control over our lives, it would have to be unambiguously, the latter.”

He said that the normal state of affairs throughout history has been control of people by governments. And occasionally, there’s been this tiny little curiosity, like America, where people had a lot of liberty for a short amount of time, but, eventually, it all went back to the normal state of affairs where governments have tight control over its people.

In other words, true democracies are historically short lived.

And he said something interesting that I’d never thought of before: the American people like to live at the expense of somebody else. Farmers want subsidies, poor people want food stamps, and businesses want business bailouts.

Now, how you feel about this defines your politics. But what we can’t get away from is this simple truth: two or three generations from now the adults of this country — our children and grandchildren — will be picking up the tab for trillions of dollars of our debt.

There will eventually be a financial collapse, because money printing and astronomical debt cannot be sustained.

But can anyone do anything to prevent it?

Probably not.

Any congressman who tries to prevent the big collapse will be thrown out of office. They can’t do what needs to be done for the country 20 or 30 years from now if they want to stay in office. They’re not going to commit political suicide by touching people’s subsidies.

And ask yourself this: are the American people, as human beings, really any different than the Spanish, or the French, the Portuguese, or the British — all great empires of the past? All of those empires are memories now. Did we believe that without the correct care it couldn’t happen to our country?

Williams — a very calm and rational man — simply said we are moving towards totalitarianism. We’re not there yet, but which way are we headed? And by tiny steps at a time? Do we have more government control over our lives or do we have more liberty?

I think we all know the answer to that.

And then there was the debacle at the Iowa Caucus which showed that the integrity of America’s voting system is in question. A new app designed to count the votes, developed by former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, was not vetted beforehand and failed.

I mean, what could have gone wrong with an unvetted app?

Meanwhile, as I write, the impeachment hearing prattles on.

My kids accuse me of having too much passion for the state of my country, but they don’t understand what’s at stake. They’re too young and optimistic that the adults will figure this all out. They just want to get on with their lives and be happy, and they have a right to hope for the best. That’s what the younger generation does.

But as Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”