For well over a century, both political parties and a long succession of U.S. leaders have failed to embrace countless opportunities across a variety of areas to make a major contribution to society or the world at large. Those failures haunt U.S. society and the world today, and this book examines several of the areas where America has fallen short. In each area - whether it is arms limitation and disarmament, economic development, or the denial of social rights domestically and abroad - the failure to grasp opportunities constitutes a form of sleep. One area the author examines is education, which has replaced the self-making, truth-seeking person committed to doing social good with the consumer focused on material things.