Of the multitude of virtues in filmmaker Ken Burns’ public television series “The War,” perhaps the most important to those of us watching is its matter-of-fact repetition of daily sacrifices made by ordinary Americans for their country.

Night after night, as I watched Burns’ World War II film progress from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor clear through to the Allies’ victory over Hitler’s Axis powers and Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri – “marching from one horror to another,” as one of his subjects described it – I saw a united America I’ve never personally experienced but grew up hearing about.

Judging by the lives of my late parents and their contemporaries, I believe Burns got it exactly right when he linked “must do, can do” attitudes to unwavering patriotism and a commitment to public service during hard times.

On foreign battlefields and heartland farms, in aircraft factories and shipyards running ‘round the clock, around family tables, in classrooms, and in pews, there was a common purpose between December 1941 and August 1945: No matter how hard it gets or how long it takes, we’ll persevere. We’ll get the job done.

Mothers who lost three of their four sons to the war; fathers posthumously awarded medals; teenagers who grew up overnight when they got off the bus at boot camp, wives who rocked a cradle with one hand and welded a rivet with the other – they’re all in Burns’ movie. Their sweet smiles, profound pain, and determined optimism were captured in news reels, home movies, and military films during what more than a few historians believe was the apex of our national spirit.

Burns’ film supports the claim by retired NBC newsman Tom Brokaw that Americans who lived during World War II were members of this country’s greatest generation because, collectively, they epitomized our founding fathers’ democratic ideal that “anything is possible for anybody.”

The men and women who came of age in the late 1930s and early 1940s fought a just war, imposed an honorable peace, led their Baby Boom children into the space age, and bequeathed to their Gen X grandchildren unprecedented economic and educational opportunities.

As the greatest generation leaves us, we continue to benefit from the blessings they heaped upon us – but without having to make their sacrifices.

That is the nub of most of our current national problems.

Somewhere between the hula-hoop, “one giant leap for mankind,” and the Blackberry, we developed a bad attitude of entitlement. Now far too many of us think we are entitled to get everything for nothing.

Leaders in both political parties think the world should love us simply because we are big and powerful and believe we are always right.

Workers think they deserve to get paid just for showing up.

Bosses think having a job is reward enough without decent health care and fair pay.

Kids think they deserve it all because “Hey Dude, I’m here.”

Amid our present prosperity, excesses, freedoms, and self-absorption, we overlook a basic tenet of good citizenship that runs like an artery through Burns’ series: You get out of something what you put into it.

That quid pro quo of the universe was a moral contract understood by every immigrant who’s ever staked a claim in the New World. A positive attitude married to hard work equals millions of Horatio Alger stories that, taken together, grew up our country.

Watching Burns’ episodes build suspense, one on top of the other, I found myself smiling through tears when, in episode six’s “The Ghost Front,” he told the story of Gen. McAuliffe’s one word answer to the Germans’ demand that he surrender at the Battle of the Bulge. “Nuts,” said the American, whose surrounded troops fought on until, finally reinforced, they prevailed.

Few Americans faced with any sort of challenge says “Nuts” anymore. ”Please” and “thank you” are also heard less. Few give up a bus seat or help old ladies cross the street. Disparaging public education has become a national pastime. Less than 1 percent of us serve in our volunteer military.

We expect a 15-percent return on our investments, buy our kids $100 tennis shoes to shut them up, and don’t know the names of our neighbors. We’re mired in a war we started in Iraq, our freedom to speak, assemble and protest is threatened here at home, and our prestige abroad is in decline.

As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote recently, “Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

Nowhere is this mindset more apparent than in our airports. I have been in four of them in the past two weeks. Shuffling along with thousands of other travelers in long lines necessitated by institutional fear of a madman in a distant cave, I see little of the unified spirit that suffuses Burns’ World War II film.

At 5 a.m., no one smiles or notes that “we’re in this together.” The United Airlines customer service representative resents having to deal personally with a confused passenger, refuses to make eye contact, and goes out of his way to be rude; later, we discover he’s separated our two seats.

TSA inspectors bellow, belittle, and single out a middle-aged, dark-skinned female passenger wearing a headscarf and carrying a gaily-tied sack emblazed with HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Three Muslim men watch from the other side of the security barrier as their wife and mother is taken away to be searched.

At the boarding gate, we see the woman again; no one offers to clear their luggage off empty seats to let her sit down.

Stopping for a snack in the food court, we watch a pre-teen drop her fast food potatoes in the floor. “Just leave it,” says her mother, waiving a bejeweled hand toward a nearby janitor, “he’ll clean it up.”

He doesn’t.

On board the aircraft, flight attendants are on auto-pilot; what they lack in enthusiasm, they make up in boredom. They spend most of the five-hour flight gossiping in the galley, complaining about their pay and benefits.

Our seatmate – the one stuck in the middle, thanks to the customer service representative who wouldn’t make eye contact – talks nonstop on his constantly ringing cell phone. After we take off, he pokes his iPod speakers in his ears and we must listen to the THUMP of his bass for the rest of the flight.

Throughout Burns’ film, veterans he singled out to tell his big story through their small ones struggled to express their long-ago fear of losing their common decency in the face of daily horrors. It was, the viewer senses, their desire to maintain a modicum of civilized behavior that pulled them through hell and out the other side.

When a survivor tries to explain the bonds he formed with his fellow soldiers, and their reason for fighting on, he said: “We weren’t heroes; we were guys who went out and did what we had to do.”

Besides our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, how many Americans can say that of themselves today?

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