The morning news brought me a story which the twinkly news lass seemed to regard as a feel-good item. But it didn’t make me feel good. Indeed, it seemed like further evidence of the decline of the West.

It concerned Neil Armstrong’s space suit, in which the first man from the planet Earth set foot on its nearest neighbor — the moon. This priceless artifact is usually on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but hasn’t been seen for a decade. It is slowly disintegrating.

Rust Never Sleeps, as the greatest (or, at least, most honest) advertising slogan ever written puts this immutable fact of life. An effort is underway to restore and preserve the first suit on the moon, but saving historical artifacts is an expensive business. The government is putting up part, but not all of the dough. So the Smithsonian has had to resort to crowd-sourcing.

Here’s part of the shameful plea to which the conservators have been reduced: “Federal appropriations provide the foundation of the Smithsonian’s operating budget and support core functions, such as building operations and maintenance, research, and safeguarding the collections. Projects like Reboot the Suit aren’t covered by our federal appropriations, which means we can only undertake them if we can fund them some other way. In other words, we won’t be able to do this project without the participation of Kickstarter backers.”

Really?

Naturally people have rallied to the cause, contributing several hundred thousand in nickels and dimes in the first few hours. That’s heartening on the surface, but disgraceful the more you think about it. Is there nothing so sacred that we can’t drop the partisan bickering and penny-pinching grandstanding and agree to fund it anymore?

We seem to have forgotten that the point of government is to do for the community what individuals can’t do alone. We used to take it for granted that it was necessary to build roads and bridges and sewer systems and water plants and airports and seaports as part of the cost of being a competitive, economy.

At some point we also decided that allowing old people to starve in the street or die like dogs was unworthy of a decent society. But lately we are told incessantly that not a single dime of a member of the public should be contributed to the government to carry out its functions. “It’s your money, not the government’s,” goes the chant of the selfish and short-sighted, as the country goes slowly to hell for the many, while the few pile their takings higher.

I am regularly assailed by pleas for funds to help the kid down the street with a bankrupting disease, our wounded warriors and on and on. But it seems to me I gave at the IRS office for this sort of thing. And so did everyone else. But all we got was tax breaks for the rich and an Ayn Rand sermon in favor of personal selfishness and opposed to shared communitarian endeavors.

I pay taxes without a whimper because I believe government ought to be a means to the end of the common good, but clearly as presently run the government is failing in its duty or sick kids would have healthcare and vets would have the help they deserve without recourse to benefit concerts and begging TV ads. And the nation’s heritage wouldn’t be allowed to molder and decay or rely on Kickstarter.

We are often told to take pride in the fact that Americans are the most generous people in the world, but they have to be since so many good causes that ought to be funded by the taxpayer go begging. Yet somehow we can afford subsidies for oil drillers and millionaire farmers and low tax rates for billionaire hedge fund money-shufflers. We can afford idiotic military adventures, but have to hold out the tin cup to save lives at home, “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”

We are even forced to resort to Kickstarter to forever preserve for our posterity the suit in which an American became the first to take a giant leap for mankind. This seems like a giant leap backward in civic pride and responsibility. This is not how a great and good society behaves. It is cheap and tawdry and unworthy.

As a people we once spanned a continent with rails and roads and reached for the stars. Now we seem incapable of doing anything but feather the nests of cats already fat and ask plain, decent Americans to reach for their wallets to take care of each other because the government declines to do its duty. For shame.