Thanks to the Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five link!
This just in over at Townhall.com: The Coming ‘American Spring.’ Color me skeptical. Excerpt:
Businesses could overwhelm the government’s corruption by offering free programs to train workers, teach them basic business skills and help people find their purpose. Our schools are failing miserably at this task.
Once people become more economically empowered and enlightened, they will no longer be vulnerable to the politicians who have infiltrated our system, schools and culture with a vail of lies and distortions. These distortions distract many uninformed Americans from the true cause of our problems: corruption and incompetence in government.
We need an ‘American Spring’ where our citizens are given the tools, technology, acumen and empowerment to remove our corrupt politicians who thrive on our chaos.
Unless a community of powerful people, with tremendous resources can invade our country’s psyche with a message of hope, help and prosperity, we will have but a dim future.
As I said; color me skeptical.
I can’t think of an incident in history where a nation, no matter how great, has turned itself around once the decline has begun. The decline of Rome began with a debased currency, debauched rulers and barbarian hordes on the border. The decline of the United States began with a debased fiat currency and the siren song of Free Shit.
Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon presents a post-nuclear war America reduced to a shell of its former self. Towards the end of that book one of the survivors, a retired Navy Admiral, comments on the state of the nation:
“…The answer was not in the Pentagon, or even in the White House. (That’s what they called the Imperial Mansion in those days.) I’m looking elsewhere. One place, here.” He tapped Gibbon. “There are odd similarities between the end of the Pax Romana and the end of the Pax Americana which inherited Pax Britannica. For instance, the prices paid for high office. When it became common to spend a million dollars to elect senators from moderately populous states, I think that should have been a warning to us. For instance, free pap for the masses. Bread and circuses. Roman spectacles and our spectaculars. Largesse from the conquering proconsuls and television giveaways from the successful lipstick king. To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.”
What Frank does not mention in this passage is the failure of equal treatment under the law. When FBI Director Comey, last summer, neatly laid out all the ways in which Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I broke the law with her private email server and then announced that there would be no consequences – and when the FBI promised immunity to all and sundry and agreed to destroy evidence – the rule of law died in this country. And now, unless something dramatic happens in the next two weeks, the Dowager Empress will be rewarded with the Imperial Mansion.
As T.S. Eliot observed:
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. That is, a whimper for safe spaces and Free Shit.
