The Rise And Fall

The United States of America is failing. After only two hundred plus years, we are losing our position in the world and we are losing our Republic. The Roman Empire lasted longer. The Holy Roman Empire lasted longer. Even the Ottoman Empire lasted longer.

Those three separate empires were all ruled, at times, by greedy, grasping, sometimes bizarre, sometimes insane people. They survived and grew in spite of their leadership. The leadership was totally focused on grasping more and more. More treasure. More territory. More military. Violence was acceptable and social programs were unheard of. If you were not of the chosen few, you survived the best way that you could. 

Anyone that tried to change society's ills and improve the lot of the poor enjoyed the wrath of the mighty. That seldom works out well for the reformers. There was no universal education. The most fortunate learned a trade.

In spite of the branding of our enemies, the United States has never tried to be an empire. From time to time we have taken possession of territories like the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. The Philippines was given it's independence. Hawaii became a state. Guam is of strategic importance and will be retained. And no one seems to know what to do about Puerto Rico. 

Our weakness and why we are losing our republic is that we have become tolerant. We tolerate a poor education for our poorest children. We coddle trouble makers and leave them to disrupt the children willing to try. We tolerate our children being absorbed for hours in video games and cell phones.

We accept crude, rude, and socially unacceptable music and TV shows and allow our kids to have a steady diet. We have lost the ability to discriminate between truth and false promises from the mouths of a shoddy class of career politicians. We allow them to spend our money on ill fated and often thieving programs. We do a poor job of informing ourselves so we can hold those politician's feet to the fire.

Because those that are somewhat informed line up about evenly on each side during an election, those that are least informed sway the vote. I fear this will happen again in 2016. If it should, we will be hard pressed to hold what we have. As it is, it will take a generation to repair the damage of the last seven years. We cannot afford much more.