A friend in another forum recently sent around a link to an article titled “Why We Should Still Be Optimistic About America”. It was behind a pay wall, so I could read only the first few sentences. I didn’t need to read more. Here below is my response:
Optimistic about America?
Wishful thinking... whistling past the graveyard...
Want to know the future of America? Look objectively and honestly to the gauges of her collective intellectual, moral and spiritual substance - all cratering.
What it all comes down to is how the sum of our collective choices in a range of categories is tipping the societal scale:
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, knowledge vs. ignorance, reality vs. fantasy, law vs. lawlessness, justice vs. injustice, liberty vs. tyranny, good vs. evil, God vs. the Godless.
Take any one of these couplets, ask "what is its collective trend in our society?", and be willing honestly to consider the answer that will loom up in your face. Not rocket science. The answers are not obscure. And please no smoking dope like friend Fish (a participant in said forum) does (figuratively peaking) in order to obscure the stark and unforgiving reality of what is happening around us and make himself feel better about what lies ahead:
I challenge any reader to show me a single category of those listed that is not collectively trending ominously downward. This is not to say that every apple in the national bushel is rotten, but there is a tipping point beyond which, notwithstanding any remaining decent minority, there is insufficient intellectual, moral and spiritual collective substance to keep society from imploding, leaving nothing but chaos and a searing, consuming passage through the refiner's fire - with no assurance that any sort of good phoenix will rise from the ashes. In that day, the only hope of escape for the remaining few good apples left in the basket will be their removal from it before the rot gets to them.
Because unregenerate human nature has been the same from the beginning and will remain the same until the end - always with the same destructive result - what we are witnessing today is nothing more than a repeat - albeit this time on a worldwide scale - of what has happened repeatedly before. I am reminded of the collapses of both the Roman Empire and the Nephite nation, two societies that, interestingly, were coming apart around the same time - around 400 AD - and for the same reasons - rot in the character of the people. Both collapses were followed by centuries of societal darkness during which nothing remotely resembling the former greatness emerged. In like fashion, there is likely to be no quick rebound from the darkness that looms ahead for America and the world.
Lest I be accused here of being a cricket-eating, hair-shirt-wearing, doomsaying lone voice crying in the wilderness, let me note, for those readers of the Christian persuasion who possess some degree of scriptural literacy, that what is unfolding right now among us and around the world are circumstances long and specifically foretold in Judeo/Christian prophecy concerning the End Times - the cataclysmic times leading up to the glorious return of Jesus Christ to the earth - "The Great Day of the Lord".
Jesus said of those days "...there will be trouble then worse than there has ever been from the beginning of the world... and there will be nothing like it again!" (Matthew 24:21). Then, as a key to understanding how imminent his return might be, Jesus admonishes us to study "the signs of the times" - events that will unfold in the world immediately preceding his return in great glory, the day when "the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all humanity together will see it." (Isaiah 40:5)
For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, those "signs of the times" have us by the lapels, are screaming in our faces and provide an opportunity for preparation. Those who have no inclination to seek after such things are in for some very rude surprises - and, IMHO, pretty soon.
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, knowledge vs. ignorance, reality vs. fantasy, law vs. lawlessness, justice vs. injustice, liberty vs. tyranny, good vs. evil, God vs. the Godless...
Take your pick. You will, one way or another...
If you can be fooled, you will be.
These are the times that try men's souls...
Torquemada