The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. - Lao Tzu
Hey! We’ve had a good run as countries go, wouldn’t you say? I would.
After a little more than 500 years after the Europeans set permanent foot on the shores of North America, we have established the most successful, enduring, and emulated republic in human history. We used to give credit for this to the God of the Holy Bible. This is something we now no longer do. In fact, we go to great lengths to shun any association with this particular God, especially in our official discourse.
Maybe that’s why we may only be getting a few hundred years out of this thing. Many might disagree. In fact, they might go on to tell us that one of the reasons America is headed to its end is because of a great hypocrisy caused by a continuous misuse of Christianity, and other religions, in the national discourse. Religion has often been an opportunity for the power mad among us to take advantage of the weak. Others might say that we have far less time than any dare think. Grotesque mismanagement of government, economics, civic institutions, and so on, have led us down a path of rapid destruction from which there is no recovery, you might hear.
There are many on the fringes of American society that believe we are rapidly collapsing for different reasons, some, or all of which may be correct. Priorities on every level have become a muddle for individuals, as well as institutions and many of these same individuals and institutions are at war with each other for many reasons. Decline and fall seems inevitable.
As a believer in a just and powerful God—you know, the One Who created a good, perfect universe—I really have to believe that while we in the United States have enjoyed monumental success in just about every imaginable way, we also shot ourselves in both feet, and have bled out slowly because of our hypocritical relationship with this same God. And He, just like the Israelites of 3,600 years ago, has allowed us to have it our way…without Him.
Having passed a half-millennium of European-influenced existence, America seems to do more to have all it can on its own terms, absent a relationship with any god that is not self-defined, self-absorbed, and self-focused. It’s logical for this to be the case, too. Since the founding, we have largely deluded ourselves into believing America was a nation founded by God for God and His people. Not, as it has turned out to be, defined by men for themselves.
Rebelliousness is in the nature of mankind. Prove me wrong. We humans are inclined to want things our way, in our sweet time. This is especially true now, in this modern time. Not only that, but we as a species will attach a substitute truth—a narrative—to justify what we want, our beliefs, behaviors, and words to cover for them. It is as old as the first exchange with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
That collapse of society I was talking about before is just as likely to come from an extremist from one side as another. Election cycles lately prove this out. Money and a good platform are all one needs for a point to be made. But to be effective, a narrative is a must.
I’m not talking about some tedious bore of a history that has repeated itself since time ad nauseum, either. I’m talking about what could be the final crisis of American history, where we get the last clubbing we never saw coming. The coup de grace, as it were, that ends it all, where our best winds up as sputum on the subway tile of western civilization.
There are many from everywhere who would like to be wielding that club to bring about our demise here in America. Many who believe we as a nation have it coming. In many ways, maybe we do. Many from within as without. Abraham Lincoln probably summarized our situation best before anything we know of the world today existed:
From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.
Our economic, political, moral, and religious history as a country is now so conflicted no one can make sense of it any more. Christians fight each other. Patriots no longer agree what makes a person patriotic. I’m a racist because of my skin color. So are you. Everyone is a bigot.
Social media is now in the hands of the masses and is beyond control of anyone. Don’t be fooled. It can be bought, but it can never be controlled, legislated, or maneuvered for long. By the way, so is the news you watch with the dinner you eat most nights of the week.
Trust is a commodity as relative as any other abstract notion many of us have bought into, and you really can’t hold out much hope in any source of those things you have once trusted in, or were brought up to believe you could. Our world of the Internet Age of the past generation has stripped us of the ability to hold anything to be truly “self-evident,” as the Declaration of Independence said in 1776.
So here we are. Much to consider the next few years of what may be the United States of America’s last few years.
We’ll talk more in another installment of Funeral Rites.
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