I’m old enough to remember when America was guided by certitudes, pride, and resolve. The old-fashioned America didn’t go to war very often, but when it did, the aggressor on the other side soon found it had made a terrible mistake.
Unfortunately, today’s America is driven by an insatiable desire for oil and an arrogant desire to save other countries from themselves. Even more unfortunately, these two desires require vast amounts of money, wasted lives, and frequent wars.
Meanwhile, diseases in the U.S. go uncured, potholes adorn the streets of our nation’s capital, and diversity and multiculturalism reign supreme. But it’s okay, so long as we keep pounding our chests and bragging that we are “the world’s only superpower.”
No one seems to think about the wisdom contained in the Rule of Holes: If you’ve dug a deep hole for yourself, the first step toward getting out is to stop digging. Then, once the digging has stopped, maybe we should rethink who we have become and what we would like to be.
- Do we really want to allow judges to rewrite the laws of the land?
- Do we really want our children to grow up in a country where the ACLU rather than certitudes dictates our way of life?
- Do we really want the government, which has proven to be inept at everything it touches, to control all aspects of our lives – including our health care?
- Do we really want to bestow upon our enemy combatants the same rights that we give to U.S. citizens?
- Above all, do we really want to try to save starving and tyrannized people around the globe, while at the same time lacking the resolve to use overwhelming force against their murderous rulers?
A guy by the name of George once spoke to this last issue with great clarity:
“I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that everyone had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves; and that, if this country could, consistently with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other considerations.”
Which one of our Georges spoke these words? George Clooney? George Soros? George Foreman? George Orwell? George Bush? Not even close. It was, in fact, none other than Big George himself – George Washington.
If Big George has been looking down on us from that Special Place in the Sky, what must he be thinking about the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars? Not to mention whatever the new mess is going to be just around the next oil derrick? It’s enough to make his wig spin.
Flags waving, bands playing, and self-declarations of our being the world’s only superpower are feel-good, subconscious diversionary tactics that only succeed in shielding us from the truth. And the truth is that, compared to George’s rag-tag bunch at Valley Forge, we are an incomparable collection of relativist wusses whose feelings get hurt at the drop of a PC word. We are so civilized that we’ve become uncivilized.
I don’t think we ever should have gone into Vietnam, but, once there, we could have ended the affair in one day by dropping a nuke on Hanoi – and saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the process. Now, President Wuss is timidly keeping a minimum of American troops in Afghanistan, where thousands more are sure to get maimed and killed. But that quagmire, too, could be ended in one day by dropping a nice, neat string of nuclear bombs on the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What’s that you say? People around the world would hate us if we did that? News flash: People around the world already hate us. And they always will, so long as we are free and prosperous. Of course, if President Wuss has his way, free and prosperous will soon be a thing of the past, and ultimately he may get the uncivilized folks on Planet Earth just to dislike us rather than hate us.
And while I’m in a grumpy mood, let me tell you another frustrating truth that most people are unwilling to face up to: You can’t do much to bring about positive macro changes in the United States of Decadence, because, to the extent you try, the secular progressives will frustrate you at every turn.
But the good news is that each of us can work hard at straightening out our own thoughts, our own actions, and our own lives. With that in mind, a good thing for each of us to think about as we head into the Christmas season is to look in the mirror and make a vow to get straight with ourselves.
It may take a hundred years or more, but the only way we can ever straighten out America – meaning, return it to a sane, moral, and just land guided by civilized certitudes – is for the populace to straighten itself out, one person at a time.
I’m game. Are you?
The Sundowner 