In the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another, “How did you go bankrupt?” to which the second character replies, “Gradually, then suddenly.” This mirrors the state of America as the country continues its transformation into something unrecognizable. The change is evident at the cultural level, which is the bloodstream of the country. It is one thing for a society to be multi-ethnic; it is quite another for that society to be multicultural.
The latter does not work. It has never worked. It’s failing in real time as a list of the world’s happiest countries shows. Each nation on that list is bound by a common heritage, a language, a shared history, and traditions that transcend any individual identity. We are losing each of these, bogging down in tortured theories that marriage is one more aspect of white supremacy as if two-parent families only come in one color, and declaring that random common phrases are tools of white privilege.
After a while, this lunacy masquerading as research and deep thinking becomes exhausting, but it’s important to stay focused. These things serve as points of division by design. A nation requires a unifying identity and a set of mutually agreed-upon principles. Without those, you have Afghanistan or the old Indian tribes that used to roam this land – disparate groups whose only common feature is the border surrounding them. How coincidental that the border keeps being steadily erased in various ways.
Last week, Tyson made two announcements: the company is shutting down a plant in Iowa, which makes at least ten facilities targeted for closure in the past year. At the same time, there are plans to hire tens of thousands of illegals. Make that make sense. When you are closing plants and laying off corporate staff, what is the rationale for talking about jobs for non-citizens?
Not to be outdone, Congress is considering two bills that are in similar conflict. One would stop including illegals in the count used to map Congressional districts and design the Electoral College map. The other was originally mentioned in a previous article and entails a path to citizenship through military service. The armed forces are dealing with a self-inflicted recruiting shortfall after years of demonizing the backbone of the military, white men, to the point where those guys got the message that they are not welcome.
Just don’t dare say any of this is part of replacement theory. The galaxy brains at Salon will accuse you of engaging in right-wing conspiracy fantasies. Because it’s completely normal to count non-citizens when apportioning Congressional seats or shaping elections. It’s completely normal to believe that people with no affinity to the country or its citizens will rise to that nation’s defense. And it’s completely normal to throw tax-paying citizens into unemployment while hiring people who should not even be here. Replacement? How could you possibly say such a thing?
Little by little, the infiltration continues. It carries some potentially catastrophic problems as the criminal gangs that roam about Mexico and the rest of Central America move northward. And if you didn’t know, a court has ruled that the undocumented can legally own guns. That should work out well. There is also a resurgence of diseases we seldom hear about, such as measles. And there are the budgetary strains among local and state govts that we have covered before. Whatever talk there was about securing the border a week or two ago has been silenced, just like the faux concern over child trafficking disappeared after the film Sound of Freedom ended its run.
When there is a concerted effort to overturn everything you believe in, where does society go? The two most common responses I see are people being encouraged to vote or pray. Really? There is little evidence that voting will do the trick. We have done that. It has not worked terribly well. Public trust in govt is at historic lows. The idea that simply handing one side or the other a working majority is a solution is regularly disproven by those put into office.
That leaves prayer. Which is not a solution at all, no matter how devout one is. For the religious and atheist alike, three conditions are self-evident among human beings: we have free will, we can engage in critical thinking, and we each have a conscience. That’s a powerful combination and it separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom that relies exclusively on instinct. People can act in their self-interest; they can weigh the merits of different courses of action; and they can determine if the likely results of those options will help or harm those affected.
Even well-intentioned ideas can go sideways, of course, but we can also recognize mistakes and correct course or, if necessary, abandon one plan for another. Except for people within the political class, who refuse to recognize their own mistakes. Can you name a single official who thinks govt was wrong during Covid? Has anyone expressed a scintilla of regret over the four-year-long Russian collusion hoax? How many have noticed that our effort to help Ukraine has mostly succeeded in destroying that country? This happens because the vast majority of people in office never pay a price for being wrong. They simply move to the next talking point.
The lawmakers who demonize high earners are the very people who write the tax code. Most of them are also in the millionaire class, despite spending their entire careers in govt. One of the enduring points of the 2016 election was Trump telling the malicious truth about the tax code and who benefits from it – wealthy individuals who donate heavily to political campaigns. Does anyone take Elizabeth Warren seriously when she talks about a tax on household wealth to finance even more govt spending? It is as if ratcheting the debt upward by one trillion dollars every 100 days is not enough.
The simplest answer to “Can anything be done?” appears to be no. Nothing will be more effective at putting the ship of state back on course than a crash. This is the last thing anyone wants to see happen, but it is hard to see a more viable alternative. The problems that career politicians pledge to fix are often the ones they create. They wring their hands about perceived threats to “our democracy” while violating democratic norms. Elected on the premise of working to support our interests, they actively work to achieve the opposite. It’s like living in an Orwell novel and as long as they can keep doing these things without suffering any consequences, they have no incentive to change their behavior.
Getting voted out was supposed to be the consequence for bad decisions, but they've learned to game the system through their divide-and-conquer strategy, getting those impacted to again vote for them, even when the pain their voters feel is a direct result of their own policies.
I've worked hard to eat right and exercise and keep my blood pressure low and hope I can keep it that way through November/January. Some days I really wonder. While reading this, the last words of the movie The Bridge On The River Kwai came to mind. Madness, madness, madness.