Life Among the Ruins

What if America's fall began a half a century ago and we just didn't notice?

Look around.

We, as a society, are being trained to accept less.

Blackouts, shortages, reduced selection, high prices, lawlessness, crime, squalor, a collapsing transportation system, an overall reduced standard of living - these are being taught as the "new normal".

While our betters cavort in St. Croix and Portugal, generally unconcerned about you.

It is happening.

If it seems that the streets are dirtier and more dangerous, that you can’t count on something you have purchased for decades will be in stock when you need it, if your community isn’t quite the same as it was a few years ago, you aren’t wrong.

If, for the first time in your life, you realize censorship means there is an “official truth (which isn’t true), you are aware your government routinely lies to you and doesn’t really care and every elected official has been touched by a corrupt system, you might just be right.

Our civilization and culture are undergoing a change – and for a generation like mine, one that witnessed putting a man on the moon, the defeat of the Soviet Union, the ubiquity of computers, mobile phones and the Internet, America becoming the lone superpower and the growth of a standard of living unknown in the modern world – it is both disturbing and obvious.

I said we are being changed, but it isn’t my generation. We are of little concern, our numbers and voices are becoming weaker with each passing day. We will die off soon enough.

It’s not us they are after; it is our children and their children.

When those people are conditioned to live among the ruins, it doesn't take too many generations to not recognize they are living among the ruins.

For a while, in the back of my mind has been the thought that perhaps everything has already collapsed, and all the current efforts of our leadership and our government is to prevent us from noticing. Maybe that was what we thought was “progress”, a bright, beautiful city was being built upon sand.

Potemkin villages all the way down.

Almost everything that is being done by the progressive movement that has been in control since Reagan (except for a brief respite under President Trump), is illusory. None of it is designed to address real, tangible issues, only manufactured issues that are bright and shiny enough to distract attention from the fact that 2020 showed us, in painful detail, how near we are to starvation from a complete supply chain collapse, how unprepared we are as individuals to survive in a convenience-free world and how willing we are to be subjected by arbitrary authority without a fight.

2021 and 2022 proved how willing we are to be lied to about it.

Richard Fernandez (aka Wretchard T. Cat) makes a pretty persuasive case that we may be alone together at the end of history:

"Perhaps the biggest underreported story of the 2020s is the widespread collapse of institutional trust and the loss of confidence in the inevitability of progress, even among the Western elite. Like frightened children in the dark, we find that we can’t trust the science and can’t trust each other. When a society finds it can’t control the future, what does it do? Can we, like our Neolithic ancestors, face the vastness of reality armed only with the blind intuition that we were meant to be? Or are we too bright for that? Earlier in this century, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson could still write: “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” Well, we are the people we’ve been waiting for, and everyone who knew we were coming has left the party."

I also note that America has missed about three or four major "Marshall Plan" moments during my lifetime when a prosperous and powerful America could have saved the world, but due to domestic policies favored only by progressives, their patron oligarchs and self-loathing, navel gazing citizens, America was made weak and unable to help or lead.

This is the fulfillment of Obama's Wilsonian desire to neuter America as the singular superpower in favor of being just another bland, weak country among many other bland, weakened countries.

Perhaps it is time to honestly and objectively observe the destruction strewn across our landscape.

Over millennia, great civilizations rise and fall. Ours is no different. Right now, today, Western civilization is being attacked everywhere. Just because things have been a certain way for a while does not mean they will always be that way. History proves that once a civilization reaches a tipping point and structural decline begins, stopping the collapse is nearly impossible.

Maybe we are already living among the ruins.

Houses built upon the sand cannot stand.

Maybe it all has to come down before we can start again.

Only it won’t be us building it back, it will be the patriots who follow.

We can only show them the path.