[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_title margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” size=”1″ content_align=”left” style_type=”default” sep_color=””]
Quiet Desperation
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The image of the breaded man in the ragged robe holding the “The End is Near” sign is common stock for humorists. It is funny because belief in progress, that we can make our world better, is deeply ingrained in our culture, particularly in the United States.
These days it is not as funny as it once was. We see the faces of the people on the street, even those who appear well off, so often reflect quiet desperation, our therapists’ offices are full of people who feel lost and bewildered, and our ubiquitous prisons are crowded with people who take unsanctioned drugs to escape the oppression of their lives.
While older marriages disintegrate, finding the way to a mate seems an insoluble riddle to young people. Many find it easier to use each other for casual sex and get a dog to provide unconditional love.
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Strange, Ugly, Coarse and Vapid
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Our commercial architecture is dominated by monolithic blocks, celebrating the machine, while our residential communities and made up of innumerable sterile copies of past styles crowed together. Fine art has become strange and ugly, popular art, coarse and vapid.
We note with unease that the blank monolithic and often windowless architecture of our schools resembles that of factories (or prisons). They are factories – designed to mass produce “standard” educated citizens as measured by standardized tests. Places of incarceration where children are drugged to keep them docile while being force fed curriculums from text books approved as a compromise between politicians.
Even more disturbing, we have seen schools become venue of horrible mass murders as deranged former students return to the institution where they experienced torment to vent their uncontrollable rage.
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Empty Churches and Meeting Places
Our churches, once the center of our communities, a place of the rituals, and shared mythos that are conducive to a common moral sensibility, are empty – victims of their insistence on the literal truth of their own myths. But the while victory of science of superstition may be celebrated – the church’s role of binding people a people together has been replaced – with nothing.
The halls and meeting places of the many community spirited cubs and organizations that once provided willing hands and funds to solve local community problems are empty too, save for a few old people who can still remember when they made a real difference. The signs and logos of these organizations can still be seen erected on the outskirts of our towns, once objects of community pride, now rusting and neglected. There is no community, just a number of people living in proximity.
Governmental Colossus
The only thing that flourishes is government, a colossus that bestrides the landscape penetrating every aspect of public and private live, enervating the will and initiative of the citizens. We vote now to the right, now to the left, the only constant being our increase in dissatisfaction and decrease in confidence with those we elect. But we can’t seem to stop, like addicts who need more and more powerful drugs, we go back to the government for everything. The only organizations that are growing in the land, however they represent themselves be it unions or non-profit advocacy groups are ultimately government lobbyists and nothing else.
Through more and more people agree that we are headed in the wrong direction few see clearly where the processes is leading us. That end, which is drawing very near, was foreseen, most prophetically, 170 years ago by Alex de Tocqueville, in Chapter VI of Democracy in America which is entitled; “What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” he describes a government that:
“..takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their (the citizens) fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
Economic collapse
We may arrive there but such a state of affairs but it not likely to endure long. The history of the United States has been one of economic glory or as De Tocqueville called it “heroic greed.” Whatever it is called and however is seen no economy has ever created more wealth nor distributed it more widely. Never the less, like all economic systems it is an ecology, complex, interdependent, dynamic and ultimate fragile. No human science can fully measure and control it, and certainly not politicians. If the history of the 20th Century has one dramatic lesson it is that governments cannot manage a command economy, the Soviets proved that beyond any reasonable doubt.
The real End will come quickly with a general economic collapse not of the US economy – there is no US economy – there is only a global economy. Another civilization may be running its course and after that what, a new dark age or a New Atlantis?
It is towards the latter that we must direct our efforts, the end is near – but there is still time.
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