America Will Survive

Yes, America will survive, but it will never be the same. Great civilizations throughout history have come and gone. The Incas, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans came and went.

The Inca Empire fell due to disease, civil war, and the Spanish conquest. The ancient Egyptian empire fell from economic decline, political instability, and foreign invasions. The fall of Ancient Greece was due to war, social unrest, economic decline, and Rome's rise. Rome fell due to political instability, economic decline, overexpansion, military overspending, barbarian invasions, civil wars, corruption within the government, and a weakening Roman army.

The people from these once-great civilizations have descendants living today. The Quechua-speaking people living in the Andes region of Peru, are the modern descendants of the Incas. Likewise, there are people alive today who can trace their lineage to other great civilizations. Some, like the ancient Romans, have been intermixed with other populations, but some DNA certainly persists.

Where America will be in the centuries ahead is anybody’s guess, but the history books will surely write about this period in terms of tectonic change. If you read above the causes for the downfall of those great civilizations, you see a pattern. Much of that same pattern has been replayed over the last decade. Some over the past few weeks. Its enablement began much earlier.

Missing from the list of causality for the fall of all the great civilizations of the past is complacency. Surely the people in each of these societies had been lulled into thinking things are as they should be. So too, America was asleep at the wheel when a wealthy class of individuals decided that they wanted and deserved even more.

 

It has been a predictable perfect storm. The fruit of our democracy was ripe for the picking. The speed of the harvest has been like a blitzkrieg. A con man of great skill in his trade, pulled together a coalition of vastly diverse followers, each with its own agenda. He promised them all what they wanted and they drank his poison Kool-Aid with delight.

One group likely to get what they asked for is the oligarchs because the con man is of their persuasion. Evangelicals will be satisfied only because they accept almost anything as God’s will. They will forgive him, his transgressions. The testosterone-fueled toxic masculinity crowd will certainly have some exciting violence to achieve his ends. The average MAGA supporter, however, will be like the frog in the slowly warming pot. They will believe the lies until it is too late, and an oligarch is being served frog legs with a nice chianti.

At my age, I shouldn’t care but somehow, I do. That I should have lived through the Golden Age of the 1950s in a united America where achieving the American dream was a possibility, but to also have lived long enough to see that dream turn into a nightmare, is an unbelievable tragedy.

God bless America and may you live to see this wrong righted.