Partner and I spoke at length last night
about the decline and fall of the Republic.
We aren’t going to be able to fix it and we aren’t going to be able to stop it. There are too many idiots.
While fixing it would be a relatively simple matter of eliminating the idiots, and while that is a remarkably simple thing to do, it’s also not a very Christian thing to do. Islam is able to murder anyone who disagrees with it, or force them into submission (See Surah 9.5, “Then when the Sacred Months (the 1st, 7th, 11th, and 12th months of the Islamic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikun {unbelievers} wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush.”) Christians tend to leave the destruction of the evil to the Creator. In the end, prayer works far better anyway, but it means a lot of suffering for a lot of very good people. And, frankly, nobody sane wishes eternal torment on anyone, and Christians tend to pray for the leading of Muslims away from their darkness and into the light. All the ones I know, do, anyway.
No, none of that is going to happen. I have hostages to my fortune after all, people I love and care about, and even if i were inclined to convert people by force, the way Islam does, they would be used as handles to control me.
At this point, most of what is left, is to remember that we lived in a golden age. We lived in an age of Eisenhower and Reagan. An age of muscle cars. An age of Toy Caldwell and Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. An age of Carey Grant and John Wayne and Kate and Audrey Hepburn. An age of Mel Brooks and Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola. An age of Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager and Thor Heyerdahl. An age of W Edwards Deming and Joe Shivers and Joseph Engelburger.
Sure, lots of cool stuff is happening today. And may happen aagin someday, when people’s imagination and creativity are no longer hamstrung by political correctness and government’s nannying intervention. But it will be a long time before we see all this again, at the level it happened during my lifetime.
What there remains, is to be St Patrick. To assemble and save the remnants of the greatness we once were, in case someone comes along that is capable of it again. They may not, but the human spirit is pretty strong, and who knows, some generations hence, the time may come when a kid picks up a dusty book and reads, and wishes, and dreams.
Our heritage is too valuable to lose, and the lessons we’re learning now- or should be- are scars too deep to overlook.
I fear we will have a split. Not that it will help, but it might keep the wolves at bay till I am in the ground.
Not much help to my children, but they seem to think the opposition has the answers.
We are entering a dark time in human history.
Also know as bad luck.
While I have nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews, I don’t have any children of my own. I fear for the America that’s coming, but like you I know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
More and more I’m reminded of a line from Poul Anderson’s “Hunters of the Sky Cave”, where Terran Agent Dominic Flandry is talking about the coming Long Night (a period of barbarism that will being at the fall of the Terran Empire, just like the Dark Ages followed the fall of Rome). He says (quoting from memory, so maybe not exact) “Anyone with any sense knows the Long Night is coming, but we know it won’t come within our lifetime. So we turn up our collars, and curse the cold,and amuse ourselves playing with some brightly colored, dead leaves.”
I WISH I could find an ebook copy of that, it was in the collection Agent of the Terran Empire.
Well said, my friend.
Mark: It’s republished in Baen’s Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra. http://a.co/hyGS0TD
Well I guess I know what I’m ordering NEXT on my Kindle! Thanks Nathan!
Praying for a Renaissance? If every failed civilization’s such prayers were heard by God, there would be no failed civilizations, sir, but the book of History begs to differ…
I regularly get commenters to the blog saying something like, “you should go out and start shooting”. Yeah, right.
Militaries have a name for guys my age when we’re thrown out to defend the homeland: cannon fodder. Like Stalin did during Hitler’s Russian campaign, putting old men and women against the Panzer tanks, hoping to gum up the tracks with their bodies.
No, I’m afraid if there’s fighting to come, it will have to be Gen X, Gen Y but mostly the Millennials.
In the meantime, I’ll remember the muscle cars, sitting in front of the black and white TV watching men on the moon, watching Viking on Mars, New Horizons at Pluto and this remarkable, blindingly brilliant, but agonizingly brief age.
And if those prayers were heard by G-d and acted upon, and hundreds of civilizations were saved, or the course of history altered, you wouldn’t have any idea, at all. So your point is???
What if every civilization fails after ten years and only prayer and faith prevents that? Your point is pretty silly then, isn’t it?
yep, S.G., I’m with you.