What killed America?
Was it two dominant political parties always in opposition and vying for power as the founders warned was a great threat to our Constitution? That is certainly as good a candidate as any. These men and women do doggoned little these days, if they ever did, to represent Americans. They instead court the money and the powerful quid pro quo. It pads their pockets and points them to insider deals that make them wealthy on a civil servants’ salary. My one man poll places the popularity and effectiveness of the United States Congress somewhere just below whale crap.
Was it when we started purging God from society? Removing prayer and any other vestiges of Him first from schools and then from any place where one might encounter an offensive Christian symbol. Even though our founding documents make the foundation of this lost nation quite clear. According to at least one Supreme Court Justice, those founders could not have envisioned what freedom and liberty encompasses in our more enlightened modern world. Apparently he does not think God got it right either. Well, who the hell am I to question a Supreme Court Judge? One of America’s appointed for life honest brokers. Turn away now, spewing your drink onto the monitor will just make a mess and hot coffee shooting out of your nose can be painful, although it will clear your sinuses.
Was it when we began abandoning people who wanted freedom? About the time a progressive Congress cut off all aid to the South Vietnamese leading to a communist victory, executions, and re-education camps and to Pol Pot’s killing fields. That emboldened enemies and pushed allies away. Clearly we did not learn from that, because we allowed them to do it again in the Middle East. As we scooted, once again from a hard fought military victory, we opened up the gates of hell on the region’s Christian population and anyone else opposing the death cult that clearly spends its nights thinking up more creative ways to murder people. We do drone one of them occasionally, that will show them.
Was it when the Supreme Court found in the Constitution the right to kill unborn children? Want to speak to me about genocide? We own the greatest one ever committed – and it is ongoing. Our president did ask God to bless Planned Parenthood once following a speech to them. Probably not a good idea. As a nation, we will answer for it someday.
Was it multiculturalism? The advent of hyphenated-Americanism? It was when we started picking the carrots and peas out of the melting pot that we began the Balkanization of America. Geeze I forgot we are not allowed to say melting pot anymore because, well, it might offend someone who does not care about assimilating. Being a freedom loving American became passé. American values replaced by hyphenated-American values and effectively destroying what we did have in common – love and appreciation for the freest and greatest nation ever.
Was it when spoiled Hollywood brats started visiting our enemies during war and making propaganda radio broadcasts, hippies burning draft cards and running off to Canada. Or was it when deserters had their bad discharges upgraded and draft dodgers were granted amnesty – and elected president.
Was it when we lost control of our borders and control of who enters our country? Maybe it was when we lost the language. Push 1 for English… When you sing your Christmas carols what image pops into your mind when you sing “don we now our gay apparel?” The language, political correctness all of it together and it is like we followed Alice into Wonderland and have no human guide to bring us back home.
Was it when the Supreme Court decided to rewrite laws by redefining a penalty as a tax and declaring that established by a state really means established by the federal government. Words now mean whatever some self-perceived enlightened judge says they mean. It is just a matter of time until they redefine what it means to keep and bear arms or any other right for that matter. Was it when the court found another right – homosexual marriage – in the Constitution? Using the same rationale for God, one must assume, as used to decide the founders could not have envisioned the modern world. Uh.. Sodom – Gomorrah.
Was it when we decided we would start removing pieces of American history because someone finds them offensive? Does that differ from ISIS destroying artifacts from ancient cultures? Minus the murder it differs not. History hidden and forgotten is history repeated. You cannot find a Confederate flag on Amazon, but you can find Nazi items, any communist flag you can name, the Black Panther Flag the people who stood in the streets of Charleston and said “finish the mission, kill all of the slave masters”, and the Nation of Islam flag whose leader just declared “we have to put down the American flag.”
Was it passive Christians who did not push back? Was it passive Christian ministers who frightened of losing their tax status failed to speak from the pulpit about where the nation was headed?
It was the man in the mirror who grew apathetic, who took freedom for granted, who grew ignorant of the history and founding of our country, grew ignorant of the political process, voted for a party not a man or woman, desired to pass his problems off to the government to solve…
© 2015 J. D. Pendry American Journal All Rights Reserved
Category: Politics
We started slipping when people focused more on what they can get for themselves instead of what they can give of themselves. Good questions all…
Well done JD. It is as though you read my jumbled mind and translated my thoughts in to English.
It’s Political Correctness, a side effect of a disease known as Liberalism, both of which are cultural, spiritual, and societal suicide!
Thank you, JD. As Zero said, you collected a lot of thoughts on this and did a great job of putting them together. Well done…
An EXCELLENT article!
The Book of Mormon tells us that we are blessed above all other lands, and that Jesus Christ is the God of this land.
So long as we continue to worship, serve, and obey the commandments of Jesus Christ, who is the God of this land, our land shall continue to be blessed above all other lands on this Earth.
But, when we turn against and reject Jesus Christ, who is the God of this land, we will be swept off from the face of this land, and these blessings will be given to some other people who are more worthy.
On that point we share 100% common ground, regardless of any other differences in our respective dogmas. And as far as I’m concerned, that common ground outweighs all differences in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe I’m being a wee bit harsh, but I do not see any forgiveness or Divine mercy for the millions of murdered babies, or the lack of activity to stop it.
It is, and always has been, illegal to murder babies in this country.
I just now e-mailed this to all the folks in my address book.
This great experiment is failing, if it has not already failed. We have many good and decent people in this country but that is not enough. For all of the things that JD cited and many more he omitted, in my book it all comes down to this: the Constitution. It is the Constitution that set the framework for our government and the Constitution that set the limits and empowered the government. But, over time, it has been twisted and ‘read into’ by so many people that what the Framers intended and what various jurists have contrived and concocted from it render the original intent unrecognizable. When a president—any president—declares acts of Congress unconstitutional, something is amiss. When a president states clearly and unequivocally that he will not enforce certain laws and he faces no consequence, well, we are in trouble. And when a president declares that he will circumvent the legislative branch and legislate by regulation or intentionally violates law himself to achieve a desired end, well, we’ve had it. The be all and end all of this country is its Constitution. People come and go, social causes come and go, but that’s okay because we have always been said to be a nation of laws, not men. No longer, it seems. We are now a nation of men and the laws are secondary. And that is our death knell as a nation.
Absolutely, it has been a death of a thousand cuts to our constitution.
Combined with a federal government grown way to large.
Well done, Sergeant Major, an excellent summing up of the ills of this nation.
I would add one other: The rise of public service unions which allowed those who rule us through their endless regulations to buy Democrat politicians, who then approved higher and higher wages and pensions for those same government employees, who then gave more and more money to the Democrat politicians, who then approved even more lucrative retirements and salaries, so that circle of corruption turns on and on, ad infinitum, enriching our bureaucratic masters who use their high office to punish us if we dare to defy them politically.
Our state and federal governments have become so corrupted by this process that their employees no longer view themselves as public servants but rather our public masters. We need a president who will do to these unions what Gov. Scott Walker did to them in Wisconsin. And then when we have curtailed their growth and influence as he did, then we need to destroy them completely and drive a legislative stake through their corrupt hearts so that they never rise again.
PT… Ya nailed a symptom well enough, what is it gonna take to treat the disease?
I give the most credit to public education and suicidalism in the academy.
I experienced a huge shift from patriotic and pro-Western education to its opposite between my elementary and high school years. The results haven’t been pretty.
(Hondo’s post on Slavery and Guilt plays into that same thing, since the opposite of what he says is what’s being taught.)
This past week has been a very depressing week for me both on the personal and political front with more of the stupidity of people on display with all the bells and whistles. Working at Walmart I get a chance to talk to people about many things, I sense after this past week a certain edginess in any discussion about all the crap that DC put out this week. I just wonder which will be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Bundy Ranch was a lot closer to a massacre than most people realize. I firmly believe that Holder and even Jarrett were on the phone with the specops people there, they weren’t BLM, not a chance. Anyway I firmly believe that both Holder and Jarrett wanted to open fire on them as they did with the bikers here in Waco. I believe that the operators on the ground refused to do it as they were horrible outnumbered. Even with automatic weapons there were a ton of combat veterans there used to taking on those odds. The Bundy ranch was another instance of Ruby Ridge in the making. At the firefight in Waco, there were federal troops on buildings with sniper positions and I wouldn’t doubt if it came out that most of the dead were shot by the snipers and not the regular cops there. Something stinks to high heaven there, if you follow it like I have been doing, it really stinks to high heaven. I am worried for my country and worried that our children will inherit a totalitarian state run amok and that there will be some sort of civil uprising that kills many thousands or tens of thousands of citizens by a paranoid left wing ideology as evidenced by the appearance of federal snipers both during the initial shootout at Twin Peaks and at a celebration of life gathering at the Waco Harley Davidson dealership a few days afterwards. A lot of the people at that shootout and still in jail today had no ties whatsoever to any outlaw biker group and two… Read more »
I believe that this Republic started on its downward slide with Woodrow Wilson (ptui!), FDR (ptui! ptui!), and the passage of the 16th Amendment (income taxes) and the 17th Amendment (direct ELECTION of Senators by the people, instead of SELECTION by the state).
If you want to go further back, you could look to Preezy Washington’s Whiskey Tax Rebellion.
How about when schools stopped teaching real math, longhand writing, and real reading skills to grade schoolers?
When grades stopped being used as markers, that was a milestone because learning was no longer important.
When small, active children were labeled ADHD by incompetent teachers who forgot that they themselves were like that, and the kids were doped into stupor, that was another milestone.
I’d really appreciate it if you who think the USA is dead would stop thinking that way. It is not dead. If it were, the KGB would pick you up at your doorstep before you could even get into your car to go to work.
EX-PH2, Et Alii:
There’s a reason for the sudden, drastic decline in the quality of public education.
It was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in, “BROWN VERSUS THE TOPEKA, KANSAS BOARD OF EDUCATION”.
Also, wouldn’t it be better if folks educated their children at home, instead of sending them to be properly indoctrinated by “politically correct” government propaganda in public schools, where helpless White children can also be prey for gangs of feral Blacks?
“wouldn’t it be better if folks educated their children at home?”
Nope, home schooling only produces dipshits like “Walk-About” Bergdahl.
Talk about being politically indoctrinated at home. There’s your real life example of that.
Then, why do home schooled kids win all the national scholastic competitions?
Can’t answer that question. There have been no elementary school aged children in my household since 1981.
Haven’t been keeping up with national scholastic competition results nor do I care to have a debate about them.
John, you have a good point, and there are private schools that offer a high end education, as well as some chartered schools that lean early on toward teaching more difficult subjects, such as Latin and French and algebra, to children at an early age. They are not typical and they are not politically correct, either.
But frankly, I’ve seen a few samples of math, English and history questions from 19th century tests that would stump a lot of college students now, because these college students are functionally illiterate. The quality of education has dropped badly in this country in the last decade. And these kids wonder why they can’t get jobs.
Home schooling is only as good as the people doing the schooling. Period. I have friends who are from France. They have five children, all of whom are home-schooled. The three oldest were taking college level courses by the time they were sixteen; all five are bi-lingual (French, English), and three of the five are accomplished in music and art. Those five kids would academically run roughshod over most kids their age, without even breaking a sweat.
I think there will be a lot more conflict over the SCOTUS decision coming along very quickly, per this article.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/religious-liberty-rallying-cry-gay-marriage-ruling-32093806?singlePage=true
I expect to see some serious backlash about that decision, because not so very long ago, businesses were afforded the right to refuse service to customers.
This is going to be interesting.
Let’s see, the decline of America eh? Less crime than ever in our nation’s history…doesn’t sound too bad. We live longer than ever before….doesn’t sound too bad. We’ve made equality for all of our citizens a priority over the last 50 years and worked to bring equal protection under the law for far more of citizens than at any time in our previous history. If you are suggesting the political climate is ill in the United States you might have some point, but acrimony has been a staple of American politics for most of our history with some notable bi-partisan actions by those of the greatest generation after 1946, but even they had their moments especially while working the civil rights movement. Millions of people still try to get here every year to live the promise of the United States, to finally find a place where all men are indeed created equal. We’re not dead, I’m not certain one could even state we’re in decline. I think what we could state is that in an economy that’s globalizing faster than regional economies can match there will be significant challenges to overcome, but we’ve done it before. We have a lot of selfish people in the nation, we’ve a lot of folks who don’t pay attention, but we’ve got a lot other people who continue to work every day to make this nation great. I agree we could and should lose the hyphenated American boxes from the census and replace them with two simple boxes, American and Legal Resident Alien….simple. Race will matter less when we actually stop making it matter so much in areas where it should be non-existent. I take issue with a couple statements, you seem to think we would be a better nation without abortion. Based on what? Under what circumstance are we better off with millions of children that no one wants who would live in poverty? Half the people posting on this board already feel the poor are getting a great deal on the backs of the taxpayers…I can only imagine the comments should we… Read more »
VOV, Et Alii:
My wife and I would have LOVED to have been able to adopt one or more of those “unwanted” babies who were murdered!
As for slavery in the Old South, I can only speculate, but I wonder if it had to be continued because the plantation owners knew what would happen if the slaves were suddenly freed, without any preparation?
England chose another method, and their slaves were freed without violence or war.
So, America’s slaves were suddenly freed in 1865, and the result was the horrors and tyranny imposed by Reconstruction, necessitating immediate creation of a Ku Klux Klan for mere survival.
Likewise, what have we got in our midst today, but with no protection from a functional Ku Klux Klan, or its equivalent?
In their hatred and self pity, Black people won’t permit White people to help them, and Black people refuse to help themselves, or even acknowledge that they themselves hold any responsibility for existing problems within their own community.
An “honest” discussion about race?
Not likely.
Truth is not permitted in any such discussion.
Within a few years of its inaugural statement, the law of the land became “Ask not what you can do fro your country, ask instead what your country can do for you.”
I think we have an awful lot of folks in our country today that admire Europe’s systems so much, they’d rather have a kingdom instead of a Republic.
Going back many generations, the most crucial mistake we made was allowing a professional political class to arise. This is why I will NOT vote for Jeb Bush, for any reason whatsoever.
More fundamentally, the apathy and complacency of the body of Christ, is IMO, the true culprit. The reason for that is, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses it’s saltiness, what is it good for?”
And this did not happen over night. The disunity ain’t helping, either.
You know, OS 54, you bring to mind a good point. Way back when we allowed politicians to remain in office practically as long as they wished, almost over night many became career politicians. That is, they became career criminally minded parasites living off the gub teat paid for by taxpayers. Then they started giving themselves incomprehensible bennies none ever earned, followed by outrageous increase in their personal salary. Not to forget the daily hand-over of tons of cash and incentives offered by even further corrupt lobbyists. Not too long and they realized the “Asleep At The Wheel” gullible public was not going to rebel against their behavior. Not many pay attention to what they are doing, and even fewer can remember it for more than one day. IMO, all elected politicians should be “checked at the door” upon entry (I. e., full account of their then net worth) and rechecked upon leaving office. How could you understand a multi-fold increase in net worth during only a couple of terms in office could happen? Finally, the retirement benefits they receive upon departing office are mind boggling and OBVIOUSLY the result of some corrupt “opportunities” if nothing else.
Damn.
And here I was thinking it was disco that did us in….
No, you’re thinking of the great Disco Apocalypse of 1980.
Actually one of my favorite Jackson Browne songs. 😉