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Haven't we all read Chuck Lyons' Aug. 27 commentary, "America's day of reckoning," before? It seems that every time this country faces a challenge we have people who tell us that our best days are behind us and that another nation (insert Russia in the 1960s and ‘70s, Japan in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and China today) is poised to surpass us. And yet somehow America overcomes and grows and prospers.

We defeated the greatest empire on earth to create a nation unlike any other in the history of man. We overcame a civil war, a Great Depression, two world wars, a Cold War, race riots, presidential impeachments and 9/11. But somehow we are not up to the challenges that face us today?

Mr. Lyons criticizes our votes for Ronald Reagan, but one of the characteristics that made Reagan the greatest president of the 20th century was his innate understanding of why the people of this nation are so remarkable.

When Reagan took office in 1981, he was confronted by the growing military menace of the Soviet Union and a miserable economy crushed by soaring interest rates and runaway inflation. The United States was a nation gripped by self-doubt, stripped bare of its confidence.

Articles with the same context and tone as Mr. Lyons' were commonplace in newspapers. Yet America rose from the ashes and thundered across the globe. Over the next eight years, Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, energized democracy and capitalism throughout the world, spurred the greatest economic growth in our nation's history and watched as pride and patriotism exploded around the country.

When I look into the eyes of my young children I thank God that they were born in a land with a limitless supply of freedom and opportunity. I do not subscribe to the message of pessimism and gloom that Mr. Lyons describes because I, like so many of my fellow Americans, know that the challenges our nation faces will be conquered. I live in a country of smart, tough, ambitious, hard working men and women who get up every day and solve, inch by inch, the great problems of our times. To ignore the amazing mountains we have climbed in our past or to underestimate the potential of our future is to truly lose sight of the example that our founding fathers set for us.

Kevin Gibbs, Olney