A Severed Artery

Here it is then. America has served its purpose. At the end of a productive career it is appropriate to retire.  How can we resent the fact.  As at the end of a long life, even those we most deeply love must pass, gently we pray, into death.  We grieve, but we rejoice the fine life lived.  So we must count it with America.  We will not think of it as degeneration.  The butterfly is changing into a caterpillar.  In a fallen creation, this must be the nature of things.

America rose and stepped onto the world stage for a purpose.  She preached liberty to all mankind, and brought wealth, and health, opportunity, actively and through her example.  She raised mankind to a new height.  In her blessings, she blessed.  We must be grateful for this, and humbled by it.  We have been the possessors and last guardians of something holy.  That we were too frail, too human, to cherish it enough to nurture it counts to our detriment, and we will be judged for it.

After judgment there may be mercy.  If we were not strong enough to protect it, not faithful enough to fight to the very extremity of our endurance to meet our duty, well there cannot be surprise in this.  If heroism were the norm it wouldn't need a name.  Think of it as the crimson cord of redemption, woven through the books of the Bible, passing even through our Constitution -- but regardless of what it might do, in reality it can't do everything that needs doing.  The universe is a balance between fulfillment and futility.  Hope can fail.  We will suffer for it, but we must console ourselves with the idea that our time is simply past, and now some other power must take our place.

It really was a beautiful dream, though.  I find myself grieving, literally grieving, for the lose of even the pretext of something so lovely.  Liberty, and that greatness of spirit that our system allowed -- the generosity and self-sacrifice, the heroism, nobility, the resolve to discern what is right and do that thing.  A wonder for the ages.  So rare.

We cannot lie to ourselves any longer.  Just another country now.  Some may have higher standards of living, some may have better education -- most anywhere may have something better. But we were America, and there was nothing better.  Can't say that any longer.  If we are governed like an occupied people, a broken people, regulated and taxed and allowed our limited allotment of bureaucrat-sanctioned "rights" -- how much soda we can buy, which words we're allowed to use -- this is certainly not freedom, not America as we have believed it to be.

This is not something worth fighting and dying for.  The only loyalty such a place elicits is that which is due to any homeland. It has never been a blessing to be French, or Mexican, or German -- these might love their country, but patriotism is just an intensified sort of fandom, like rooting for a sports team ... it's our team, so we cheer for it.  America was something different. Like Israel.  Not just a light but a star, to guide the world.

Ah well.  We wake from the delusion of Santa Claus.  There is only mom and dad, who work hard to care for their kids.  We had thought our mothers were virgins -- no longer.  Some of them are sluts.  We thought our fathers were heroes.  Some are poseurs.  But I misspeak.  We are that ignoble generation, and it is our children who will pay for it, at a cost disproportionately greater than the pleasure we demanded for ourselves.

I am unspeakably saddened.  It's not that the decline has not been clear.  But now it is undeniable, and I fear irreversible.  Sluts can become chaste, but they can never again be virgins.  We went whoring after a preening fool four years ago.  It turns out we like his sodomy, because we have confirmed our devotion to his perversions.

On the grand scale, it's just a passing from one era of history to the next.  To be expected.  On the personal scale, liberty matters, and we are witness to a sort of mass-extinction of rights.  Turns out man-caused Climate Change was real.  It's just that the climate was that of liberty, and the change was for diminishment.

How will I ever regain control over my own health care?  How will I ever be able to exclude the bureaucracy from my life?  They take a little, and a little more, and more still, until it is all theirs and they allow us to have a morsel, a crust from the lords to the lepers begging at the gate.

I just can't think about it any more.


J