Certainly our leadership led us to this moment, either through planned action and policy change or through creating and nurturing an atmosphere of mass ambivalence. Whatever the reason, as a nation, we did this to ourselves. As a nation, we deserve what we have.
We were led by the nose with promises that our input was important, that our votes counted more than anything else. Yet, right from the beginning over 250 years ago, when the Declaration of Independence was penned, those words were empty right out of the gate. It did not get much better when The Constitution was created. Eloquent words making promises that many in leadership knew were but so much Bullshit. Those words may have meant something then and might have still have meant something now if we had paid more attention and honestly applied those words instead of the 250 yearss of lip service we paid them instead. Instead. we were seduced by snake oil salesmen with slick presentations of imaginary Evils they created for just that moment.
Our current leaders want us to be patriotic without question. They want a nation of servile Nationalists who are blindly loyal to the leaders' vision of what they want America to be. We have spawned a Leadership that doesn't just want us to believe in American Exceptionalism, they are willing to cram their policies down our throats and up our asses. Authoritarion governments do not foster voluntary love of one 's country. They only present the delusion that the citizenry loves their country, while ruling over them through fear and intimidation.
When tyrannical methods are used on the populations by fiat, or by armed force, "Love of one's country" is not often how the people respond to their current circumstances. When mandatory loyalty to the flag is too severe or lasts for too long, it will always fail. The length of time matters not, eventually tyranny fails under it's own foul weight.
Good times don't last either. More often than not, the good times are just the predecessors of bad times.Our co-existence with each other is a repeating cycle of good times, then bad times, then good times...... a cycle that has been part of humanity since I guess we first collected in tribes. The cycles may not be unavoidable.The trick is to try to make the landings as soft as possible.
Every Rise or Fall happens in a series of phases..... Bad to Good, then Good to Bad. I think America has entered a more alarming phase of Good to Bad; Our current leaders, for the most part, have damaged or destroyed many of our political alliances and allowed our economic strength to wither on the vine. The rest of the world is leaving us in the dust behind them. As the World moves forward into the future, here in America we attempt to move back to a time that only exists in our minds. We have the government in our streets using violence to support government crackdowns on fabricated emergencies that were never as bad as the government contended. Many of them never even existed until the leadership conjured them up.
I see America now at an in between stage. We are no longer on top of the World. We are well on our way to Second Tier status as a nation. My question is, will we make this decline bearable, or will we allow it to snowball while we dick around squabbling and pissing on each other's shoes?
On that cheery note, Later Gators ......................................
_____________________
John Prine has a way with song lyrics. "That' How Every Empire Falls", in so few words, explains the reasons Empires fail. Not the nuts or bolts of why, but he shows us the emotions, personal and cultural failings, that are the backbone of every fall.
