There is hope in our time. Indeed there is something even more solid than that, but we must be aware if we are to be on the right side when it happens.
I think back to the decades I can remember living through. In spite of much that was bad they still make today seem like a bad dream. Indeed a nightmare we might expect to wake up from at any moment, but like I said, we have good reason to be hopeful. Allow me to quickly review these decades so I can explain what I mean.
The 60's saw a not well advised war in Vietnam. Also an egocentric president decided to put his mark on society with his "War on Poverty". We learned from the Vietnam War though we still disagree what it is exactly we learned, but at least we learned something. The "War on Poverty" on the other hand turned out to be a war on poor people and the soundness of our government's financial state. We still haven't learned from that war as we continue to hurt ourselves by still fighting it.
The 70's was a decade of hyper-inflation combined with economic stagnation, and we were beginning to think that losing the Cold War against the Soviet Union was inevitable. All we could hope to do it seemed was to delay and maybe get the Soviets to be kinder and gentler by the time we surrendered.
That decade also saw the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act. A well meaning but poorly informed piece of legislation that ultimately brought about the financial collapse in 2008.
The 80's and 90's were decades of surprise triumphs. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and other leaders like Martin Mulroney led a very unexpected turn-around for the Free World in the Cold War which was won by 1989. If that weren't enough they also proved that government withdrawal from the market place could be a good thing.
In the 90's George Bush (senior), Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair stopped both the withdrawal of government from the private sector and headed off American isolationism by successfully promoting interventions in the Balkans and the Middle-East. Markets, still benefiting from the looser policies of the 80's and being artificially stimulated by government interventions made the return to the bad course of the 60's and 70's look like it was a good thing again.
The first decade of this century is too close to us for me to see it wise to summarize, but we all know what happened in 2008 in the financial sector, the inevitable consequences of the horrific mistakes of the 60's, 70's, and 90's.
The wise amongst us knew there was a price to be paid for looking to government for answers and civil leadership, and now we're here. We are at that point where we start to have to pay the price.
We are in the worst economic period in our history since the Great Depression and under-informed voters enthusiastically re-elect the worst president in our history in terms of his and his adviser's understanding of macro-economics. Lyndon Johnson's war on the poor is almost complete. They are now destroying themselves. It's only a matter of time before they are decimated and completely unable to resist their own exploitation.
People have successfully labeled all voices of reason as simply "wrong". No actual sound reasoning to support this claim of "wrongness". Why make it complicated when so much of their power is derived from the ignorant people they exploit. Besides, every time they actually present an argument it gets torn apart and they have to depend on their dominance of the media to hide their defeat so no one knows it's happened. While all the under-informed people they want to suck power from will only know of their argument and think it's sound, why waste the resources needed to cover things up? They're learning to just not bother with the argument in the first place. Just tell their media accomplices that so and so are wrong and be done with it, be done with them.
The worst of this is not yet here but we can see it coming down the road. Yes the road. Here we stand behind the gates and walls of civilization, all we have left of it anyways, while they use the highways of human communication which we surrendered around a century ago to roll their siege engines up to our defenses.
They want a government free of the restraints of economic laws, fundamental traditions of human civilization, or any other human or universal law that might otherwise stand in their way of achieving their vision of the greater good. Our last defenses are truth and reason and they are getting ready to bring them crashing down.
Our present time is like none other we've seen. The people currently in charge in the United States have set themselves against reality itself and they have a willing collection of followers behind them, enough that we can't just expect them to have to pay a rightful consequence at the ballot box.
It almost sounds like the description of the final rebellion against God that Saint John wrote about in the the Book of the Revelation, where in spite of clearly seeing Christ's second coming and triumph over all His foes, a large group of people rebel against Him. Almost.
Where it differs, and what frightens me so much about it, is that these people aren't setting themselves against God. They're not determined to sin in spite of Him. They're setting themselves against natural laws, against reason.
I say they will bring our final defenses of truth and reason crashing down, not because I believe they'll succeed in dispensing with reality, oh no. I say they will bring our final defenses crashing down on top of them. Short of some divine mercy where people like ourselves are put back in power in time to turn all this around and undo all this self-destructive policy, the inevitable result of their even having some political power is destruction.
When that happens we need to be in the right places taking the right stands, and most definitely not with them. We need to be ready for that day when finally all that will matter is what is right and not who they want to be right. That will be a time for a re-birth of reason, a new renaissance, a reset. Are we ready for that day?
I think back to the decades I can remember living through. In spite of much that was bad they still make today seem like a bad dream. Indeed a nightmare we might expect to wake up from at any moment, but like I said, we have good reason to be hopeful. Allow me to quickly review these decades so I can explain what I mean.
The 60's saw a not well advised war in Vietnam. Also an egocentric president decided to put his mark on society with his "War on Poverty". We learned from the Vietnam War though we still disagree what it is exactly we learned, but at least we learned something. The "War on Poverty" on the other hand turned out to be a war on poor people and the soundness of our government's financial state. We still haven't learned from that war as we continue to hurt ourselves by still fighting it.
The 70's was a decade of hyper-inflation combined with economic stagnation, and we were beginning to think that losing the Cold War against the Soviet Union was inevitable. All we could hope to do it seemed was to delay and maybe get the Soviets to be kinder and gentler by the time we surrendered.
That decade also saw the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act. A well meaning but poorly informed piece of legislation that ultimately brought about the financial collapse in 2008.
The 80's and 90's were decades of surprise triumphs. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and other leaders like Martin Mulroney led a very unexpected turn-around for the Free World in the Cold War which was won by 1989. If that weren't enough they also proved that government withdrawal from the market place could be a good thing.
In the 90's George Bush (senior), Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair stopped both the withdrawal of government from the private sector and headed off American isolationism by successfully promoting interventions in the Balkans and the Middle-East. Markets, still benefiting from the looser policies of the 80's and being artificially stimulated by government interventions made the return to the bad course of the 60's and 70's look like it was a good thing again.
The first decade of this century is too close to us for me to see it wise to summarize, but we all know what happened in 2008 in the financial sector, the inevitable consequences of the horrific mistakes of the 60's, 70's, and 90's.
The wise amongst us knew there was a price to be paid for looking to government for answers and civil leadership, and now we're here. We are at that point where we start to have to pay the price.
We are in the worst economic period in our history since the Great Depression and under-informed voters enthusiastically re-elect the worst president in our history in terms of his and his adviser's understanding of macro-economics. Lyndon Johnson's war on the poor is almost complete. They are now destroying themselves. It's only a matter of time before they are decimated and completely unable to resist their own exploitation.
People have successfully labeled all voices of reason as simply "wrong". No actual sound reasoning to support this claim of "wrongness". Why make it complicated when so much of their power is derived from the ignorant people they exploit. Besides, every time they actually present an argument it gets torn apart and they have to depend on their dominance of the media to hide their defeat so no one knows it's happened. While all the under-informed people they want to suck power from will only know of their argument and think it's sound, why waste the resources needed to cover things up? They're learning to just not bother with the argument in the first place. Just tell their media accomplices that so and so are wrong and be done with it, be done with them.
The worst of this is not yet here but we can see it coming down the road. Yes the road. Here we stand behind the gates and walls of civilization, all we have left of it anyways, while they use the highways of human communication which we surrendered around a century ago to roll their siege engines up to our defenses.
They want a government free of the restraints of economic laws, fundamental traditions of human civilization, or any other human or universal law that might otherwise stand in their way of achieving their vision of the greater good. Our last defenses are truth and reason and they are getting ready to bring them crashing down.
Our present time is like none other we've seen. The people currently in charge in the United States have set themselves against reality itself and they have a willing collection of followers behind them, enough that we can't just expect them to have to pay a rightful consequence at the ballot box.
It almost sounds like the description of the final rebellion against God that Saint John wrote about in the the Book of the Revelation, where in spite of clearly seeing Christ's second coming and triumph over all His foes, a large group of people rebel against Him. Almost.
Where it differs, and what frightens me so much about it, is that these people aren't setting themselves against God. They're not determined to sin in spite of Him. They're setting themselves against natural laws, against reason.
I say they will bring our final defenses of truth and reason crashing down, not because I believe they'll succeed in dispensing with reality, oh no. I say they will bring our final defenses crashing down on top of them. Short of some divine mercy where people like ourselves are put back in power in time to turn all this around and undo all this self-destructive policy, the inevitable result of their even having some political power is destruction.
When that happens we need to be in the right places taking the right stands, and most definitely not with them. We need to be ready for that day when finally all that will matter is what is right and not who they want to be right. That will be a time for a re-birth of reason, a new renaissance, a reset. Are we ready for that day?
Some may think when reading this post that I'm promoting survivalist behavior, but I am most definitely not. I am encouraging people to prefer being right to being popular and even to being powerful. When truth and reason come crashing down on those currently in power, people aren't going to turn to people hiding in cabins in the wilderness. They are going to turn to the people who didn't abandon truth and reason.
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