Faith, grit, and sacrifice build prosperity and comfort, and plenty ends it.
If we had not gone over the moral cliff long ago and abandoned truth-telling, we would not have the pending societal collapse and fiscal reckoning to worry about. It’s cause and effect.
It is not that concerned citizens and various national leaders (of both parties) didn’t post warnings over the past fifty-plus decades that great danger lay ahead for the Republic. The urgency of citizen action was lost in the push and pull and business of everyday life.
After all, the citizens hired their politicians to ensure everything was in order, right?
This is the well-worn pattern of unraveling for many great civilizations, cultures, and families. The good life and its plenty and pleasures blind the reality that history follows. Faith, grit, and sacrifice build prosperity and comfort, and plenty ends it. Life’s ease is quickly assumed to be a right or the natural order of things when it is just the opposite. And warnings about its vulnerability or approaching dangers that could end that good life are ignored.
A point of natural similarity that describes this pattern is the hurricane disaster in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The storm was first reported in the Atlantic and landed in Cuba as a tropical storm. Then, it moved into the Gulf of Mexico, meandered for a week, gaining hurricane strength, and headed to land. Hurricane warnings of the approaching danger went out along the Gulf Coast, but most ignored the warnings. On September 8th, the Category 4 hurricane hit Texas’s bustling and largest port. A city of approximately 40,000 was destroyed, and 8,000 were dead.
So here we are. Over the last fifty-plus years, the nation has detached the connection between moral order, fidelity to righteousness and justice, and what is right and wrong. Now, the hurricane comes.
Only last December, the nation saw the devaluation of the critical intellectual and historical underpinning (and thus good end products) of its universities and colleges – in real time – during congressional testimony on campus antisemitism before Congress by the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. They were the dimmest of dim bulbs who embarrassed even the wet tissues in Congress. Can these institutions that once informed the culture so significantly even be salvaged?
Over those decades, the state-run media conglomerates have ceased even the pretense of practicing journalism. Instead, they drifted into the national government’s orbit, money and legal coercion, operating narratives, and political chicanery to find workarounds for all that “government for and by the people” nonsense. Lies and double-down lies, lies by omission, as far as the eye can see. The nation’s once great major newspapers are now not even birdcage material. They are factually state propaganda. And yet, there is no shame, no remorse, even when people are destroyed or die by their lies.
The titans of business, Wall Street, and the tech oligarchs quickly followed behind the media moguls. It’s enticing, no? A big club where power, money, politics, and legal leverage come together to rig the rules. Heck, the big shots even get to hire their own lobbyists who write the legislation and regulations that affect them, so the dolts in Congress can get back to fundraising. Think Big Pharma here.
Importantly, the Ruling Class gets to separate themselves from the little people totally, or as Hillary Clinton let slip, the deplorables. Their forward vision is distinctly feudal.
The organs of the government, like the DOJ and the “national police” or FBI, and intel agencies grow like crabgrass. Historically, they miss virtually all the real threats but act as guardians for the ruling class. A new form of “lawfare” is spreading where crimes are what a judge or US Attorney says they are, and law enforcement is weaponized for political ends.
The courts and lawyers man the gates for tribute, and justice becomes what you can pay for.
We get laws and regulations that flood the land, like the Mississippi River in the rainy season. Most bills are hundreds or thousands of pages designed to hide, not illuminate. Only yesterday, citizens were allowed to see the nearly 400-page “Border Security Bill.” It’s merely one in a conga line of bills that are outright graft and absurdity from the Ruling Class that illustrates all of the above. The bill has nothing to do with border security, of course.
Existing law already gives the President absolute power to open or close the border by executive action and end the invasion.
No additional law is required. The current resident in the White House wants a never-ending flood of illegal aliens in the country along with the ten million who have already walked into the US illegally in his term.
The bill does, however, cost another $118 billion, added to our trillion-dollar deficit. Surprise – $60 billion is going to Ukraine, so there is plenty of cash for the slush funds and graft flowing back and forth. Israel gets a tad over $14 billion as well. Then, various funds in the $23 billion are going to “border security,” which is a “flexible” term.
Like spitting in your face, the bill states in a manner of self-congratulation that the legislation will allow only 2 million people we don’t know into the country illegally per year.
The bill is a grotesque lie – the entire package. A con job to make Americans think these reprobates give two cents about border security. They don’t. The spectacle of a calculating and dishonest “governing class” flimflamming the taxpayers with preposterous financial gimmicks only exaggerates the sense that the federal government sees itself as the “untouchable sovereign.”
All of this sits atop the rubble made of the larger culture where the American family has been squeezed, marginalized, and co-opted by welfare systems, school fiefdoms, endless taxation and regulation that shift power to the uncaring state, eradicate the role of a father and marriage to a quaint suggestion, while empowering the state enormous and near-monopoly status to raise children in now rapidly declining elementary and secondary schools.
Doing all of this has amounted to a colossal failure, but in the new world, no one ever has to say, “We’re sorry.” Or worse, “We were wrong.”
Instead, the behemoth state gathers more strength, funding, and more career bureaucrats in its failure and rushes to find new ways to fail upward. The incompetence and didactic demands for forced conformity championed by the dogma of ignorant men and women know no outer limits.
The worst is that we have lost the critical requirement of telling the truth in the broader national life. That, of course, is why even comedy has died.
In time, this type of intentional dishonesty bleeds into the public mind, and individuals begin to use the standards they see their government employing. But the hurricane comes nonetheless.
There are no good answers to where we are today. Keeping the Republic even on the margins will be no easy feat. In one sense, who is President matters less than who we are. Ultimately, we must decide whether we personally, and as a nation, are slaves to the darkness or sons and daughters of the Light.
This is an amazingly daunting task to be taken this close to the storm – but is there a choice?
2 comments
It is good to see your passion, Michael. All of often intellectualism gets in the way of rough and uncomfortable truth.
We’re not dead yet.