bigsean

(in courtesy of one of my facebook friend)

We are living at the most critical time in the history of the United States of America. Indeed, ours is the most critical time in the history of human civilization. The reasons lie in the confluence and convergence of problems that we face, in America and worldwide, problems that span every facet of life and that are of such type and magnitude that there can be no setting aside, no downplaying, and no imagination in any magic wand of legislative or fiscal practice, nor in any magic spell by charismatic words. In all of these problems, and in any realistic set of answers that helps us to emerge from crisis into a new and sustainable future, America is at the center, at the crossroads, even as it is itself – as a society and as a nation – in the crosshairs of the crisis. This is not a matter of nationalism or inflated pride in a “super-power” outlook. This is simply the economic and social reality that America is in a very necessary and appropriate way a key part of the engine that runs and guides human civilization now, and this is not to be decried or denied, because this is linked fundamentally with why America came to be, what it stands for, what it should be, and what it can be as a society of people living with the unalienable and undeniable rights, and responsibilities, of a people where all persons are endowed with equality for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The founders of the United States were both gifted and blessed as they argued, and became inspired, and became reasoned, and convicted, in the definition of our country and our principles of living in community, under our social contract, under our laws. They knew what they were doing and they acted with what cannot be called anything other than divine guidance and inspiration that gave them the ability to craft a government that could work and sustain itself in spite of human weaknesses of avarice, greed, narcissism, pride, and all of the seven deadly sins. They were not perfect, nor has anything about our Republic ever been perfect and beyond reproach, much less debate. However, what was crafted during those early years, not only but particularly with our Constitution, was a living engine for creating and sustaining freedom and liberty by which people as individuals and as communities, small and large, could live in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling, and respectful.

It is not by accident, nor by charlatanry, nor by military aggression, that America became a stalwart beacon, and a staunch defender, of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” around the world, in many countries and societies where repression and totalitarianism were the rule, de facto and de jure, and where people have been for the most part slaves, serfs, or caste-imprisoned subservients to gangs, cliques, and elistist tribes. Our nation has made and has maintained constant efforts to promote the same principles and practices that led people to stand up and fight, to lay down their lives, for the right to say, “I live this way, or that, and I choose to believe this, or that,” in manners that achieve a truly amazing balance of powers, urges and emotions such that everyone can hope to have such a free life without being crushed or enslaved by his or her neighbor’s lifestyle.

There have been seemingly countless examples of how we have failed in one way of another in our striving to achieve this noble balance. No one can say that America has been without all the same types of faults and failings that have occurred and do take place anywhere in human society. However, we have built a social contract, a set of principles, embodied in laws, that constantly attains, and strives to attain, that perfect balance, and this constant and focused striving, this unrelenting and determined vigilance, is a very important part of what is at the core of America’s greatness and her value for all of human society.

Now, however, in our very dark evening, perhaps entering into our darkest hours, we stand at graver risk than ever before to lose everything, to lose our sense of purpose, our values, our balance, and our Union. I speak not only of the Union of the States per se, but our deeper Union as a Nation. The threat before us is not comparable to the split that led to the Civil War. What is our risk now is even more insidious, a threat of Civil Dissolution that may leave us broken, dismantled as a country, fragmented not into two federations or confederations, but into a set of warring factions that could make the Civil War look like a preferable state of affairs in comparison.

Look around, and consider what is missing and conspicuous in its absence within America. We have so much in material possessions, comforts, wealth. We have science, technology, engineering, medicine, and the list can go on and on. However, there is an emptiness and a void and it is unmistakable. We have lost honor, and integrity, and dignity, and courage. We have lost leadership, and vision, and direction. We have lost this not overnight, and not due to one man, one group, one political party, or one movement. But we have definitely lost things that were much more present and alive in all facets of our society, among all groups and types of our citizenry, in decades and centuries past. We have lost our strength – and we must regain it now, if we are to survive as a nation and as a people.

Look now at the people who dictate policy and decisions in our country, and you find not leaders, but factions and special interest groups, inexperienced, angry, hostile, and with self-gratification on their minds rather than hard work and community-building. “Political correctness” and fear from the wrath of special-interest factions armed with the media now govern nearly every part of the governmental process. We have witnessed a cascade downward in social and political integrity that is unprecedented, and with it has come economic collapse that is already in this year clearly the worst depression that this nation has suffered in its history. We are on the brink of a massive wave of racially and ethnically motivated ruthlessness, a backlash against nearly everything that has been the mainstay and pillar of civilized society, led by splinter groups and special interest factions. This “new wave” that appears to now have taken over the control of both the Congress and the Presidency is dominated by people who have stirred up actual and imaginary support from masses of the population in support of agendas that are neither liberal nor conservative but something that is very dangerous and threatening for our entire society. These are people who cloak their emotional vendettas and diatribes in the guise of liberal thinking but which have nothing to do with freedom (Latin liberalis suitable for a freeman, generous, from liber free) or “ideals of individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government.” Rather, they promote belief systems and practices that are more strictly, empirically, demonstrably fascist - totalitarian, sectarian, radical-fundamentalist and authoritarian.

We are as Americans at a critical turning point. We can go down a road that will lead, painfully and shamefully, toward the breakup of our Republic and all that it stands for and has stood for. We can thus abandon not only ourselves but our children, and our ancestors, and the rest of humanity, including those people who live in oppressive societies that are laying down the lash of cruel radical fascist fundamentalism more viciously than ever, yet who look to America – at least the America of its first two centuries and a bit longer – for guidance, inspiration, and leadership. We can give up the fight and become slaves to a fascism waiting to unleash its venomous self across our land and into our homes, defiling both the pillars of conservancy and liberality on the dirty altar of unprincipalled, contra-ethical hedonism and pseudo-relativism, a society of “We’re in control now” and “You are politically incorrect.”

We have seen this happen so many times before. France in the 1790’s. Russia after 1917. China, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, the fragments of Yugoslavia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Even from this list, there may seem to be at first glance a total mixing of types, from “left” to “right, from communism to pseudo-socialism to far-right fascism. Yet in a careful analysis, it is really very much all the same dangerously diseased story of small factions, greedy and determined to usurp power, using the weaknesses of divided masses of humanity, preying upon weaknesses of not simple poverty but deplorable lack of education, conviction, honor and courage, making use of the weak who are weak not in terms of physical strength or intellectual prowess but weak entirely in spirit and soul. These factions are not liberal, just as they are not conservative; they are gangs, but very smart and sharp in finding how to manipulate those who want to not work but to live off the backs of others, those who want to take but never give to their society, those who want to seize and subject but never obey laws or principles of any moral code.

We are at a point where the United States of America is close to turning into a totalitarian state and it is not something coming from a cadre of neo-Nazis or hard-core Klansmen, nor from a Communist Party with loyalties in Russia as was once a fear in our homes and schools that almost ran out of control and created a fascist nightmare in America. We are facing an even worse threat, one that is deep-rooted and now very strong, and it may turn America into precisely the type of fascist state that people feared in the 1950’s from the likes of Joseph McCarthy, except that its slogans and banners are quite unlike those of that era. This is the threat from the so-called radical liberalism of the “progressive” Democratic Party dictatorship that is now steamrolling its way through one act of legislation after another, Barack Obama as its very racially convenient and highly charismatic figurehead, and a mob of special interest factions pushing, pulling, and controlling – not by logic but by Brownian motion, the decisions of Congress and the Executive Branch – to do what it, the Mob, wants, because It, the Mob, is now dictating what is politically correct and incorrect, down to the smallest iota of thought, deed, and word.

We face a very uncertain future but some things are reasonably clear and none of them look very attractive or healthy for our nation. Our economy is in shambles and ruins, our businesses caught in a kind of catatonic fear, and not only our banks and financial institutions. Our public health system is a disaster and we are at risk for severe catastrophes in the event of natural or intentional biothreats including such as could lead to devastating pandemics. Our energy sector is weak, excessively dependent upon unreliable and unaffordable foreign resources. Our transportation systems and basic infrastructure of roads and railways is outmoded, incapacitated, and unable to adapt to our hugely mobile population and our lifestyle’s transportation-intensive supply chains. We are grossly dependent upon foreign manufacturing for all basic elements of life including food and clothing. Our educational system is in abysmal decay in its foundations and the levels of competence among our youth go down and down, as we subscribe to the “radical (non)liberal” fascism of “no sluggard failing a class” because it will be taken as a sign of ethnic discrimination and/or racism. We have no long-term programs underway addressing the next generation and beyond with respect to anything – not with energy, health, elderly welfare, the frontiers and potentials of space, our food supply, or the control of our excessively increasing population.

In all of this, we have something that is worse because it is at the root of the causes for all of the above problems. We lack honor, courage, and selflessness in our leadership. We have, in fact, no leaders, no individuals of great spirit and strong discipline who will stand up and keep on leading, not thinking of personal gain or fame, not flinching from the curses or threats of factious opponents, not veering from the path of reason and logic for choosing courses of action that are best for the well-being of the Republic and that for which is stands and upon which it is founded.

We have come to a point in history from which there is no rolling back the clock and no return to some era of the past. We can only go down one path or the other – a path of further decadence and decay, a path that will lead to the breakup not merely of a formal institution, the United States of America and the loss of what our ancestors have so carefully created and defended - or a path that will be very hard work, and much sacrifice, and much discomfort, to rebuild America anew, to rebuild our nation into being what it was founded to be, to rebuild America’s soul by rediscovering in our own selves, families, neighborhoods, communities and states what it is to live with honor, discipline, integrity, trust, and courage.

I have lived as an American all of my life, as my parents and grandparents lived before me. I can remember what this country was like thirty, forty and more years ago. I see the changes and the decays, the rot in the roots and in the limbs. There are plenty of reasons for doubt that we can succeed in rebuilding a nation when so many have turned away with either apathy or with the mesmerizing, hypnotic drumbeat of a neo-fascism, a pseudo-liberal democracy that is a travesty of what our founders lived and died to create. However, there are many more reasons to go forward with disciplined determination and unwavering courage. We can create the real change that America needs, the change that is a return to balance, to basic principles, to reason and logic in government, law, and social practices. We can win, but it will be a struggle no less than that faced and undertaken by the revolutionary colonists in 1776, by the Americans of both North and South in the 1860’s, and by our whole country in the years of World Wars. Let no one imagine that it will be any less difficult, painful, and even full of sacrifices that go beyond economic and material hardship to the ultimate sacrifices of life itself.

I recall as in a solemn chorus the words of so many teachers and forbearers, the words of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and many more including into the years that most of those reading this have shared, closing decades of the 20th century, when there were people who were not afraid to speak up and speak out in spite of the catcalls and threats from political correctness firebrands and rabble rousers. I hear now very few strong voices but a great many cries and complaints that are honest and sincere but weakened by the emotions, the noise, the cacophony of voices and spirits that are not unified, not together, not an army but a crowd. All of this must change if we are to succeed at saving and conserving our Republic. We need to speak with a strong, unified voice. We need to form an army with discipline and leadership. We need to Act, to cease with our passive state of being bitter and angry complainers about the loss of our country and our liberties, and to step forward with brave determination and Act to rectify the situation, to reverse the damage, and to set in motion a truly new American Republic, one that is not just words and papers but a living Nation of actions and laws. We need to rebuild America into a Republic that is renewed, founded and grounded upon those inalienable rights given to us by God, by Nature - our equal rights, our truly equal and unique right for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a right that extends to all, including those who may be just ordinary folk, the middle class, the non-minority mainstream, those without special, selfish, “poor me” entitlement interests.

This new Republic is attainable, it is within our reach, and we are not too late, but we stand at the edge of a precipice. We have inherited a nation that was established under the living words, “In God We Trust” – now let us do so, and march forward, in union, and live each day now with the faith that that God, howsoever and in whatever language and form He speaks to us individually, will guide and inspire us, as He did with our founding fathers over two hundred years ago, to find our leadership and our courage, for the battles that lie ahead in the valleys of our worst fears and our greatest courage and victory.



Martin Joseph Dudziak

February 19, 2009
Henrico, Virginia

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Very impressive article coz I totally agree with him that America is not like what your founding father defined anymore. Watched the video of CNBC's Rick Santelli and traders expressing outrage yesterday, and they share the same view, but not necessarily as deep thought as Martin's.

I wonder how, if still possible, for America to lead the world out of this? what is China's role and how's the US-Sino relationship likely to evolve.

China is in a critical time as well. Uncontainable social instability is rising fast and a series of soverign level conflicts have being occurring recently, and we'll probably see more.

I don't have a clear vision on both US and China getting into warfare either internally or externally. However, I'm deeply worried.

Sean

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