Posts Tagged → OWS
Current American Parallels with the Fall of Ancient Rome
In the recent past I have been in touch with some old high school friends.
We were quite close way back then. All remain good people, and we have maintained irregular but meaningful contact for the past 35 years. So any communication between us now is like picking right up where we last left off way back then.
“When are you and your militia friends going to storm DC?” semi-teasingly asks one, a professional resident of Washington, DC.
Immediately I’m thinking “Trump winning pretty much was the storming of DC, in a way.”
But I don’t say it, as the cascade of shallow whining about the election results sure to follow has become regular and boorish among Trump detractors.
“Josh, I was no Hill-Dog lover [Hillary Clinton], and I liked Kasich [presidential candidate], but do you really like Trump?” asks another, this one a successful self-made businessman, his face unhappily wrinkling over Trump Anything.
Given the constant opposition to the Trump presidency from both establishment parties (Republicans and Democrats, or the ‘UniParty’ as some call both parties together), as well as from taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients, some small and many big business folk alike, and especially the media-academia Big Government complex, now seems a good time to remind everyone who has something to lose of the history that brought America up here and could drag us back down.
First, like America, ancient superpower Rome was also “too big to fail,” both in the minds of Romans and their many enemies. They had too much money, too much military power, and the Roman people were living too fantastically a high standard of life to envision it actually dissolving.
In that way, America is no different than Rome, or any other major civilization that has come and gone before us: We perceive we are too wealthy and powerful to fall, and our personal lives are so fantastically comfortable and convenient that we cannot imagine all of it coming undone. It’s just too good. How could it possibly go away?
But fail and fall, Rome did. First sacked in 410 CE by its own mercenaries, and then for good in 454 CE by its mercenaries allied with their ethnic tribes. Inside jobs, both.
Second, like Rome, America is an island anomaly in a sea of big, all-powerful governments, dictatorships, really, domineering little citizens. While by today’s standards ancient Rome may not have been a free society, by the measure of its time it provided a lot of liberty and opportunity to individual citizens, much more than anywhere else.
Rome also had a semblance of the rule of law. Most nation-states back then were simply feudal aggregations of people with swords at the top and field-cropping, over-taxed serfs at the bottom. No rule of law.
Today, Planet Earth still has mostly tyrants and dictators, with a cruel grip on their respective populace. So, like America now, Rome then had some extra work to do to hold itself together. Government power had to be diffused among senators, army officers, and business people. Standards and expectations were higher among a wider group of people. Government power, societal stability, quality of life did not depend upon the one monarch alone.
Predicting the end of America is almost as silly as predicting “climate change” -caused sea levels catastrophically rising, and super-powerful storms catastrophically leveling human civilization.
Though there is evidence of climate and weather affects on past human civilizations, it is a historical fact that human civilizations come and go of their own accord, usually due to simple power lust and ego. Sometimes environmental destruction rendered the land unfit for habitation. So on that alone we know that some day America will change. And it will not be a change good for the majority of its citizens.
America is nowhere near where Rome was when it fell, in terms of military preparedness. But in other ways we are past where Rome was, in terms of our unsustainable debt, ironically held by some of our worst enemies. The Chinese have become a kind of mercenary banker force, also supplying us with the electronics we use to run our daily lives as well as much of our military. That they are spying on us through their electronics is already proven.
Plenty of people inside and out would like to run America themselves, without the annoying, dirty citizenry in the way.
And yet so many Americans continue to party on, oblivious, as if we are invincible, invulnerable.
Go ahead and tease me, friends. Your ribbing is funny. But you should also be reflecting on the implications of ANTIFA, BLM, OWS etc mobs-cum-militia already rampaging across American streets, including DC and the US Capitol. Those stormings are already under way, under cover of national media and academia. They are real, and neither I nor any militia I know of have anything to do with them.
Go ahead and casually write off people like me, ‘kooks’ who love America in a simple way, a traditional way. We love all Americans, in all their ingenuity and passion for liberty and opportunity, and we have therefore come to despise the power-grab being waged against the citizenry by Big Government latté sippers. In both parties.
Go ahead and smugly dismiss us, mock us, cheerily toast our foolishness.
Just remember in the back of your mind, it is you we are trying to save. God knows, you can’t get it done.
Top Fake-Out of 2011
Looking back, 2011 was a year full of fake-outs. Political, sporting, and cultural fake-outs.
All of these failures to deliver left disillusioned people in their wakes. Some, like the Jerry Sandusky\Penn State sex abuse scandal, left a lot of hurt and disillusioned people in its wake, not to mention the abused boys who welcomed the miserable company into their sad world.
The top political fake-out has to be the Occupy Wall Street “movement.”
OWS is not really a movement in the sense that lots and lots of citizens belong to it and it is representative of some larger but still-quiet change coursing its way through the body politic. Heck, there might be a thousand people per state who actually participated in OWS-themed activities across America. Maybe not even a thousand people per state. Busing in professional activists and workers from across the country to protest sites is well documented. So maybe it’s 500 people per state?
We are talking about at most twelve thousand people out of a nation of 350 million, and maybe only six thousand people.
But you’d never know it from the media reporting on it. OWS and its clones in California, Ohio, Harrisburg, PA, and elsewhere had maybe a handful of people at any site except the actual Wall Street site of Zuccotti Park and the ever-ready-to-protest San Francisco. But the media treated these few people as though they were the harbingers of great change. Their violence, filthy living conditions, rapes, drug use, vandalism, incoherent rants, circular discussions, and racism were routinely ignored in reports by mainstream media outlets (on the other hand, new news outlets are sprouting up right and left, like infowars.com, as POV videoed interviews of OWS kids are posted to YouTube and other sites).
But despite the actual sparse numbers of actual participants, the once-vaunted Columbia University is now actually teaching a course called…”Occupy Wall Street.”
That’s right. Both an undergraduate and graduate level course on OWS will be taught at what was at one time one of the nation’s premier centers of higher education. No one at Columbia is really sure what will be taught in these courses, but I am willing to bet that the filth, drugs, rapes, violence, vandalism, racism, incoherence, sedition, treason, and slovenly behavior at OWS sites will not be part of the syllabus. Columbia University, like all other “Ivy League” schools, has now just dropped another notch in the estimation of middle class families looking for a good return on their investment in Little Jane and Johnny’s education.
But OWS will also live on as a “movement” to be studied, emulated, promoted.
Never mind that two years ago a pro-Second Amendment rally on the steps of Pennsylvania’s state capital that attracted 1,500 supporters from across the nation received zero mention in the local newspaper, the Patriot News, while mini protests of two to five people waving placards against the Iraq War (where have they been the past three years, one wonders) were routinely covered as though they actually represented some sizeable part of the population.
OWS does not represent many people in America. Maybe five percent, or ten percent in a really bad economy like we have now. But their friends in the mainstream media make sure that their voices and position in the news are amplified far beyond their actual numbers and importance to American political discourse and electoral outcomes.
OWS should be studied, as the biggest fake-out of 2011. And maybe one of the biggest fake-outs in American history.