[antimedia] antimedia: What's wrong with America?....

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Posted by antimedia:
What's wrong with America?....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1182394398.shtml


   ....You don't have to be a member of Mensa to perceive that something
   is seriously wrong with America. Where once the country stood behind
   it's warriors while battles raged, now many people, even national
   leaders, actively seek the country's surrender in a time of war. Our
   political class seem uniquely disconnected from the desires of the
   people, deviously plotting to shove amnesty down our throats despite
   unprecedented opposition from a huge majority of an otherwise
   (purportedly) deeply divided public. The elite media seems to delight
   in revealing the most damaging secrets of America's prosecution of the
   war, without the slightest regard to the tyranny it could bring upon
   itself if it succeeds.
   What's going on? What is the genesis of these terribly conflicted
   times?
   I believe life is far too complicated to lend itself to simple answers
   or trite solutions to overwhelming problems. To point to one event as
   the genesis of the present malaise is to trivialize the complexity of
   the events that have led us to the present. However, I do think there
   are discernible patterns that can be traced to seminal moments in our
   past that, perhaps completely unanticipated, altered the course of our
   nation inexorably.
   There are three major themes that I see in the present day that can be
   traced to events in the past, sometimes with obvious connections,
   sometimes with tantalizingly obscure ones.

   ([1]show)

   Those themes are a loss of faith in government, a loss of trust in
   family and marriage and a loss of innocence in sexuality. Each of
   those themes can then be traced to a loss of trust in God. (For those
   of you who are not religious, please bear with me. I am not religious
   either, but I do have a deep and abiding faith in God. I am convinced
   that, if you give my argument its due, you will at least agree I've
   made sense, even if you disagree with my thesis.)
   The 1950's were a time of great prosperity and growth in America. Back
   from four long years in Europe and the Pacific, young men and women,
   scarred by the horrors of war but also wiser and more sober, put their
   noses to the grindstone and began to build something. They were
   serious about raising families, industrious about making money and
   discrete about their private lies. Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy and
   Bonanza were huge hits on the new television technology and Abbott and
   Costello and Ozzie and Harriet were moving their hugely popular radio
   shows to the new visual medium as well.
   Life was good.
   Soon [2]Dwight Eisenhower, admired leader of the recent great victory
   in Europe, was elected President. By the time his second term had
   ended, the national GNP was double what it had been in 1945. Americans
   eagerly embraced the new prosperity, buying homes, automobiles and
   appliances with an ease their parents had never known.
   In 1960 [3]John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President on a platform
   of national security, tax cuts, civil rights for all and a can-do
   philosophy encapsulated in his famous inaugural aphorism, "Ask not
   what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your
   country."
   Enthusiasm and excitement swept the country. Idealistic Americans
   signed up for the [4]Peace Corps in droves. The media, enamored with
   the Kennedys, wrote of "Camelot" and reported every outfit that Jackie
   wore, including the name of its designer. Prosperity was everywhere,
   testing the resolve of parents who struggled to raise children who
   would never know the hardship they had endured as children or as young
   warriors fighting to free the world.
   However, dark storm clouds were on the horizon. America was fraught
   with turmoil over the issue of race. The war in Vietnam would soon
   loom large in the public consciousness, trying the soul of the nation.
   [5]Playboy Magazine arrived on newsstands shattering taboos that had
   been winked at in the past but never discussed in public. And soon
   three of America's admired leaders, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther
   King and Robert Kennedy would be murdered, struck down by deranged
   assassins, casting a pall of death and delusion over the country, a
   pall that would deepen as the Vietnam war dragged on and tales of
   American atrocities, many of them false, would spread their stench
   across the land.
   The media, perhaps sensing the underlying cause, wrote that [6]God was
   dead, echoing the [7]famous Dostoyevsky line, "God is dead, therefore
   man becomes God and everything is possible."
   Indeed it seemed that everything was possible for man. Simply passing
   laws could solve racism and grant rights to the "disenfranchised".
   Lawsuits could bring "relief" to the "long oppressed", forcing police
   to read "victims" their rights before questioning them, releasing
   career criminals on "technicalities", aborting babies for convenience'
   sake and turning justice on its head. Trust in government began to
   wane, as the "lies" of the past were trumpeted by those who sought to
   wrest power from the leaders of the past and steer a new course for
   America.
   In just ten years we would send a man to the moon and, more
   importantly, bring him back again. Many began to believe (and I use
   that word deliberately) that almost any problem could be solved by
   government. Yet government could not be trusted to act, indeed must be
   forced to act, using the power of the courts to overcome the foolish
   will of the people.
   John F. Kennedy's call for personal responsibility subsided into the
   background as a new ethos took hold - Ask not what you can do for your
   country. Ask what your country can do for you.
   Gradually, the personal responsibility and "bootstraps" mentality that
   made America great was replaced by a socialist, communist mentality
   that seduced the unsuspecting and the ill-informed into a mythical
   nirvana where all the ills of society could be solved by regulation
   and governmental control. God wasn't dead. He was simply forgotten,
   not needed -- pushed into the background by a society flooded with
   materialism, sexual "freedom" and personal "rights".
   Just do it became a watchword for a generation satiated with
   materialism and believing in a personal "freedom" that included open
   sexuality, abortion on demand and quickie divorces to "solve" the
   problems encountered in marriage. The family began to crumble, an
   anachronism experts claimed, something no longer needed in the modern
   age.
   The zenith of this insanity is men's beliefs that they can actually
   change nature, i.e. "solve" the problem of global warming by issuing
   "carbon credits" and cracking down on "major polluters", achieving the
   nirvana of "carbon neutral" living. Somehow this will tame the storms
   and calm the temperatures and make everything "normal" again.
   Nevermind that every major storm, every F5 tornado, every massive
   earthquake and every volcanic explosion presents us with the
   irrefutable evidence of the impotence of man.
   Reality is now fantasy, fantasy reality. The transformation is so
   complete that clear evidence is no longer enough to overcome the
   powerful, irrational belief that man controls his own destiny. Thus
   people believe that a government that is so inept it can't control its
   own borders is so adept that it can orchestrate a massive conspiracy
   to start a war to gain control of oil.
   It reminds me of that line from [8]The Six Million Dollar Man -- "We
   have the technology. We can rebuild him." (Which, of course, had to be
   followed up with [9]The [DEL: Six Million Dollar :DEL] Bionic Woman,
   because it wouldn't do to discriminate against women but they can't
   simply follow in a man's footsteps.)
   So here we are -- modern man in all his glory, master of his own
   destiny, ruler of the earth, no longer in need of God.
   [10]Half the people in America who marry, divorce. A million children
   are touched by divorce every year. [11]A million and a half, each
   year, are aborted. At any given time [12]about 6.6 million people are
   either in prison, on parole or on probation in America, and [13]almost
   6 million are victims of violent crime.
   If the past forty years were an experiment with godlessness and
   socialism, the results argue that it was a complete failure. The heady
   days of the fifties and sixties have been replaced by high divorce
   rates, easy abortion instead of self-control, rampant crime that
   victimizes millions of people a year, increasing incidents of mass
   murder and a government that has grown so large that it [14]consumes
   ever larger amounts of the GDP and threatens to consume almost one of
   every two dollars earned in America if something doesn't change, yet
   seems ever more impotent when faced with an onslaught of problems.
   Meanwhile, respect for government has never been lower. Illegal
   aliens, with the full knowledge of their landlords and employers,
   openly scoff the law, crossing the border routinely with no fear of
   arrest. Over half a million of them have already received deportation
   orders, yet they were released on their own recognizance and the
   government has no idea where they are.
   Why shouldn't they? The politicians who pass the laws exempt
   themselves from the very laws they pass and create elaborate
   strategies to enrich themselves while ignoring the will of the people
   and attempting to stifle any dissent. If leaders lead by example, the
   results speak for themselves.
   The problems are manifest and obvious. The causes are many, but at the
   root, the very core, is one glaring mistake -- America turned its back
   on God. Instead of trusting in God to lead their way, Americans turned
   to the government for their help in time of need.
   Oh, we still go to church in large numbers, and many, many Americans
   still believe in hard work, honesty and faithfulness to God, country
   and family. But that number dwindles every year, as more and more lose
   heart when faced with a seeming tidal wave of socialism and political
   correctness. That alone tells you that they have abandoned God.
   In my next installment, I will write about what I mean by "abandoning"
   God, how America was subtly tricked into doing so and what America can
   do to return to "the glory years".
   By the way, I believe in the God of the Bible, but when I refer to God
   in these articles, I am referring to Thomas Jefferson's "diety" and
   George Washington's "supreme being", the "Creator" and "Nature's God"
   of our Declaration of Independence. That may mean something entirely
   different to you than it does me. That's fine. Who God is, is less
   important than that God is.
   ([15]hide)

   Tags: [16]America [17]God [18]socialism

References

   1. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/antimedia/posts/1182394398.html
   2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/34_eisenhower/index.html
   3. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/35_kennedy/index.html
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Corps
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy
   6. http://partners.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/reviews/990523.23trippt.html
   7. http://www.rzim.org/slice/slicetran.php?sliceid=286
   8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man
   9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bionic_Woman
  10. http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html#anchor1137337
  11. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005099.html
  12. http://www.pbs.org/now/society/prisons3.html
  13. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-09-crime_x.htm
  14. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=3521&type=0&sequence=0
  15. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/antimedia/posts/1182394398.html
  16. http://technorati.com/tag/America
  17. http://technorati.com/tag/God
  18. http://technorati.com/tag/socialism