I champion democracy and understand that it is far less effective in guiding a population than is authoritarianism.

 I am financially conservative and emotionally liberal.  I see laws and government as necessary evils.  I am intensely patriotic and understand why so many foreigners hate our guts.  I am a physical coward that understands that my very fear is one of my greatest vulnerabilities.   I champion democracy and understand that it is far less effective in guiding a population than is authoritarianism.  I believe in education and understand that it is a heartbeat away from indoctrination.  In all of these ways, I see myself as being not unlike my fellow American, even as I understand that half of us favor a balance between the conflicting points of view that is unlike the other half.  As I look back at history, some of which I have lived through, I see a continuity of these dichotomies that stretches back to the dawn of time.  I also see fear as being the principal factor in achieving commonality.  

Assuming that my analysis is basically correct, it would seem to explain humanity’s constant alternation between war and peace.  One group of us manages to achieve dominance over some segment of the earth for some period of time, but none of us manage to convince others that our leadership is uniformly beneficial to all.  Eventually, the tide shifts and another group, with other philosophies, takes charge of that piece of the earth and all who live there.  Understandably, the group that is losing power and influence refuses to understand what is going on until it is too late to avoid conflict, and we fall into another cycle of violence. Back when soldiers walked to work carrying slings and arrows, the devastation was minimal.  As technology “advances” the instruments of war become more devastating and conflict wreaks greater and greater havoc.  I am not a clairvoyant, and so I do not know if we are presently involved in the end game, but multiple nuclear weapons on top of ballistic missiles makes me suspect that we very well may be.

As I said before, I am at root a coward, but I also understand that most authoritarian alternatives to democracy are much less attractive, and I am, reluctantly, willing to stand up to them.  I would love to have some company in my opposition to authoritarianism and I see today’s America as blocking that happening.  What pretends to be democracy in action is in reality nothing more than cowards refusing to understand what is happening outside of our cocoon of wishful thinking and insisting that everybody ignore what we all see with our own two eyes.  Our once great cities are falling into decay and the well-to-do among the residents are fleeing to the suburbs.  Criminals of all varieties are filling in behind them and taking over small fiefdoms that quarrel with one another and intensify the deterioration of life there.  Increasingly, influential international criminal syndicates intensify the threat.  Greater and greater numbers of Americans live on the street, indulge in drugs, and violence, while all of the societal tools needed to deal with the mess are being neutered and corrupted.  What are euphemistically called “progressives” insist on inviting the rest of the world to come live with us and refuse to check their physical, political or mental health until after their entry, at which point, we insist on giving them financial assistance, which tends to increase the flow beyond the point that neither our economy nor our society can cope with the sudden influx.

Our, your and my, response is to bury our noses in our phones and dumb down the list of subjects that concern us most.  The current list includes the number of potato chips in the bag, the age of the fetus, the cost of gasoline, the proper use of pronouns and our precious feelings.  Internationally, our cowardly leaders have gotten us into astronomically expensive, regional proxy wars in two different parts of the globe and we are seriously considering adding yet another in yet another different part of the globe, while totally ignoring lower level conflicts that are occurring in far too many other regions of the world.  The most ludicrous example being a bunch of ragtag, Stone Age, bullies that are cleaning our clock in the Red Sea to the extent that the world is reorienting trade and thus massively impacting inflation in the entire world.

While we do not choose to understand what is happening to us, our foreign adversaries include folks who do understand it, and that poses an increasingly serious threat which we are ignoring to our considerable disadvantage.  We have piss-poor “leadership” and it is entirely our, yours and my, fault.  Wake the phooey up!  We are on the cusp of losing it.  All of it.