The Inevitable Decline of America: Some Thoughts

Uncle Bill Warner

There is a lot of speculation as to how ancient civilizations fell: overpopulation, depletion of resources, decadence... I’m sure most Americans have thought at one time or another, if the United States is on the way out. Being a natural cynic (some would say realist) I can only make a few observations on the subject and let you come to your own conclusions.

One consideration has to do with who has what. As the rich class continues to enrich itself and the impoverished class grows, the have-nots who have been taught all their lives that if they work hard, they will succeed and join the rich in their privileged, walled bastions of power. That is easily disproved by looking at the facts, where CEO’s rake in millions for doing little more than running the country into bankruptcy and farmworkers out picking in the 100-degree sunshine and getting exposed to poison spraying barely get along.

The destroyers of America export factories and jobs and then condemn out-of-work folks on unemployment, pretending thay are lazy and just want to be on the dole. Our ideal of "individualism" ("hooray for me and screw you") has not served America well. Read the preamble to the Constitution which mentions, in passing, that one purpose of government is to "... promote the general welfare." I remember a certain grade "B" actor once saying that young people seeking an education should pay for it themselves, as they would be earning more than non-college people in a few years. The goal of education, for him, was to prepare a person to get more stuff for himself, and if bussing dishes in the school cafeteria took away from study time, too bad. Hooray for the individual, and the country be damned!

Those evil Russians had the ridiculous idea that an education would help people to better serve their country, and that paying a salary to students who kept their grades up made sense. Well, as a large percentage of those educated folks decided to betray the people who had educated them for the common good by running away to an "I can make more money for me, myself" situation over the wall to West Berlin. Maybe the idea of personal gain supercedes the common good in most cases (Mother Theresa aside). The only problem with this is that personal greed as the prime motivator contains the seeds of our own societal destruction.

Another practice that can eventually doom a society to extinction may be found in the rich having the tools to keep the population in ignorance. The people of America don’t really control the airwaves or newspapers. The rich do. Poor people in the main do not own the sources of the information on which they base their decisions. The notable exceptions such as Pacifica Radio, a low-circulation newspaper printed in somebody’s basement, or a few Internet sources such as Truthout are seen as enemies by those who maintain their power by lying to the people. Truth is the enemy. The People, if they knew what the rich were really doing, might rise up and stop the madness camouflaged as "news". Those who hold power through spreading lies, fear, hatred, and divisiveness do not help America become stronger.

Have you ever noticed any of the rampant hypocrisy put out by the "powers-that-be"? They laud democracy and freedom, while, as in Viet-Nam, they killed hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese who just wanted to have free elections and elect their choice of leader, not ours.

We manufacture situations where the poor workers in other parts of the world are held in check by despotic, U.S.-armed dictators for our benefit, yet we mouth the word "freedom" as our goal for those people. We pretend to have free elections, but allow them to be bought and rigged by those with money. We pretend to be the most advanced country in the world, while overlooking the fact that one in 5 children grow up in poverty and over 50 million Americans have no health insurance. We pretend to be morally superior, but have no compunctions about using torture to further our ends. Add "hypocrisy" to the list of things that are destroying America.

When I used to be a teacher in the public schools, each day was begun by drilling into young minds the ideas in the Pledge of Allegiance, which sound great, but are basically lies from beginning to end. Why to we pledge allegiance to a flag and not to our fellow Man? Also, what exactly is the "United States of America"? The land we are abusing? The crime? The poverty? The greed? The religious intolerance? The unemployed due to "good Americans" exercising their freedom closing up American shops and moving to China? Is there liberty for all ? How about the tremendous economic inequalities? Justice for all? You mean that a rich man with a top lawyer is going to get the same shake in court as a poor man with a public defender? The Pledge sounds great, but is just a hollow statement of ideals rather than realities.

We have strip-mined America, we have clear-cut it, we have paved over it, used up its iron ore, coal, oil, and copper. We have pumped water from diminishing aquifers at a rate exceeding replacement. We have overpopulated it far beyond its ability to provide a decent standard of living for all, and we have crushed opposition to our will all over the world. Look at all of our wars over the past 100 years or so. All fought in other people’s countries. We call it "defense." The rich profit from it, and the taxpayers subsidize them with our military, keeping down all opposition to our will.

We ignore the contributions of hard-working people who come to the U.S. looking for a better life and do our best to persecute them and drive them back where they came from. Pretending that they are "illegal" ignores the fact that our ancestors did not have green cards from the Indians whose land we came to.

It seems to me, that any society having a privileged class sucking up more that its share, and keeping people in line with mythology rather then truth, which uses religion as a divisive force, and makes enemies of the 49% of the population which did not vote a certain way, and which does not look to the future...running the country on borrowed money that can never be repaid, and which tries to keep its privileged position in the world with military force which it cannot pay for is doomed to extinction.

Add the "individualism" which puts personal profit over the general welfare, which believes in using up our natural resources (as well as those of other countries) for immediate profit, which keeps refuses to live by its stated ideals, and which spends more time spreading hatred, fear, and division among its own people than in taking care of human needs at home and abroad, and which is based on the lies designed to keep the American people in the dark, is not going to make it in the long run.

I am saddened to see smiling new parents with their small children blithely believing they have done a good thing by bringing new life into a catastrophe of our own creation. Their future, I fear, is not a bright one.

Do I feel there is any way the present trend can be reversed? Sadly, no. I think we can slow our rate of decline with tiny, ineffective measures like making cars that get 45 miles per gallon rather that 30, recycling our beer cans, and importing less food, natural resources, and cheap manufactured goods, but in the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

If our drive for "more" for each of us individual continues, and with an increasing population putting more pressure on our diminishing resources continues, as I think it will, America is doomed to follow the "great" civilizations of the past. We cannot control our population or replace the oil we have used up. We cannot replace fossil water used to grow our crops. We cannot, I think, change human nature, with its desire to get "more" for each individual, usually at the expense of someone else getting "less."

Eric Hoffer’s ideas from "The True Believer". It seems clear that persons hearing lies long enough will become true believers which cannot be deterred from folly by facts. Facts (or as close as we can get to them) are ignored by a huge part of the population, and intelligent decisions cannot be made without having a grasp of facts and acting on them. I will doubtless be labeled as "un-American" by many who read this. Personally, I think that having cancer and pretending you don’t is not a good thing. Knowing that there are problems with the way humans do things may help one accept the inevitable. If we truly believe lies that can easily debunked by having open minds, does it make for a strong America?

Still, you cannot have the attitude that "there is nothing we can do". That is a death trip.

As I see it, we have to do what we can to try and make things better, even suspecting that

in the long run America will destroy itself. If you have a better idea (prayer?) well and good.

The America that I want to believe in is a myth, but I cannot give up. I’ll do what I can, knowing full well that it will not be enough. "All we can do is try to leave America a little better place than it was when we found it," words that ring false as I drive my car to a lecture on how our thirst for oil has brought about so many deaths in our wars to secure our supply. Most of us are hypocrites, refusing to look at the self-evident truth that we are our own worst enemies. Maybe the Truth can save us. Maybe it is the only thing that can save us. There is an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole from which you cannot escape, the first thing you should do is to stop digging. If we are willing to look at what has brought us to this state of decline, at least we can, to retain our self-respect, stop digging.

I’d like to leave you with a nice upbeat "if-we-only-start _________" (fill in the blank) hope. I can’t.

In the words of Mark Twain. "Sorry I wrote you a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one."?

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