An Empire in Decline

 

By Don Feder

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever?

In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality.

Nations too have seasons. Imagine a Roman of the 2^nd. century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take.

France was the thing in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.

In the 19^th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire. Now Albion exists in a perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population is aging so rapidly, that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1946, almost at the midpoint of the 20^th century – the American century.  America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, we won a World War fought over most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.

It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.

We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and COVID.  We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA, the blueprint  of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome?

America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well nowhere in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year.

Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.

The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, Dr. Jill had to lead him like a child.

In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble  nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.

We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds.

We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5^th graders could pass a generation ago.

Crime rates soar and we blame the 2^nd. Amendment and slash police budgets.

Our culture is certifiably insane. We have men who marry men. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.”

We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year.

Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality.

Our “entertainment” is sadistic, nihilistic and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified.

A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress.

We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.

How meekly most submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks and hand sanitizers) shows the death of the American spirit.

How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?

• Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win
• Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay
• Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde
• Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule
• Allowing indoctrination of the young
• Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy
• Losing national identity
• Indulging indolence
• Abandoning faith and family – the bulwarks social order.

In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.

Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had?

I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.

This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.

During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, “Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.”

The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us?

While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.

 

 

Comments

[Rook]

The USA has two kinds of people that both include every political persuasion, every ethnicity and all races. They are the people who create, build, teach, enforce laws and govern; and the people who don't work, who are letting the government take care of them.

The first group are entrepreneurial and capitalist. They want a small government that will stay out of their way and let them produce. They are capitalists.The second group wants big government that will tax the producers heavily so they can stay at home and live on government handouts. They are socialists.

Republicans cater to the first group. The democrats cater to the second group. Our country is divided along these lines. Unfortunately, the layabouts seem to be gaining in numbers over the producers. That is the USA is thirty TRILLION dollars in debt. If EVERYONE got off their couch and went to work, ANY work, we could be debt free in five years instead of the current projection of a hundred and fifty years.

[Ruwanna]

The democrats have shown us how stupid they are by choosing Biden and Harris as their leaders. The American people are ashamed of them; incessant gaffes, contradicting themselves and their own administration. The fuzzy brained staffers and cabinet continue to make excuses for them and defend them when everyone knows they're wrong. Frustrating, shameful, ridiculous behavior from both Biden and Harris. What a nightmare!

[Gunny]

I doubt that very many students today know anything about Churchill, or even WWII for that matter. The self absorbed youngsters I see every day have their nose buried in their cell phone constantly. They think that online "friends" are real friends, but they can't carry a conversation except through a computer or phone. The Chinese know how to run an education system and that may be the deciding factor for our place in the world.

[Franklin]

Feder hits the nail on the head. He identifies so many clues to our eventual demise as a great country. How do we turn this damn thing around when the new generation of narcissists is woefully ignorant on how to keep us great. Sad.