The Setting Sun

 

This is the most depressing piece I’ve ever had to write. But recent events have left me no choice. The Great 2020 Presidential Election Hoax and the subsequent Georgia Senate Run-off Election Travesty were the final triggers.

The United States- all 50 of them- cannot stay one nation any longer and remain true to its founding ideals of limited government, free markets, and the idea that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are individual’s rights granted by their creator.

It really has come to this, tragically, but without question. There exist two diametrically opposed viewpoints in this nation now, and the crux of the matter is that the left will simply not allow an intact America to continue to exist unless its policies and views prevail. Period. Conservatives will no longer be able to vote our way out of bondage.

Leftists will riot, they will indiscriminately- even joyfully- destroy property and people’s reputations alike.  They will commit acts of violence. They will refuse to pay their taxes. They will engage in other acts of “civil disobedience.” They revel in the politics of personal destruction. They baselessly smear those who disagree with them. And they attack, attack, attack, attack- without evidence, reason or justification, all while gleefully wallowing in their superior immorality…which, bizarrely, they believe makes them more moral than those who oppose them. They will do or say anything for power,

Therefore, one of the saddest things for me to acknowledge is that the United States has recently become a corrupt nation; not just a few individuals here and there, but more thoroughly and institutionally. This is in direct contrast to the Founders, themselves currently under assault by the politically correct automatons, who take their marching orders not from reason, tolerance, or a desire to enlighten, but from a dark and deep-seated need to make themselves appear worthier-than-thou by denigrating their own country- and excluding anyone who doesn’t worship their pseudo-inclusiveness.

The virtually intractable, unconquerable problem at the root of the matter is that government has grown too big to be either moral or efficient. The millions of people who work in the hundreds of agencies comprising the federal government see the status quo as their lifeline, below which they would never willingly go. To these bureaucrats, government must either get bigger or remain unchanged. Add in the tens of millions on the government dole, the hordes of illegal aliens that have entered the country in recent years and the nearly 3 million shape shifters who currently work in the media, and it has become utterly impossible for one man or one administration to survive long enough (politically speaking) to push through many reforms, no matter how desperately needed.

The Founders believed in citizen rule. Public servants were expected to be just that. There were heated debates about whether they should receive any pay at all. Terms of service were to be kept short. Above all, government was to be kept small and accountable. The Founders knew, better than any before or since, that governments, and those in them, typically become more corrupt the more power they accrue and the longer they are in existence. This was the reason for the Declaration and the Revolutionary War. And the reason they spent four brutal months holed up in a hot, humid, fly-besotted room in Philadelphia to craft the most effective, vital, beneficial form of governance the world has ever known. This Constitution was the owner’s manual, if not the Holy Grail, of a unique and free republic…of, by and for the people.

 Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving Independence Hall after signing the sublime document, was stopped by a countryman. The lady said, “Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?”

To which he famously replied: “A republic…if you can keep it.”

We have decided we know better than those old white men now. We have been ignoring that owner’s manual more and more of late. Soon, it appears, we will toss it out altogether.

The country is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. At that time, the country was at odds over the evil of slavery. The United States could no longer continue to exist as it was with a mix of slave states and non-slave states. [Or should I say “Coexist,” progressives? I don’t think there were many “Coexist” (with slavery?) stickers on the back of many horse-drawn carriages back then]. One of the tragedies of the Civil War was that the concept of state’s rights was sacrificed in the ultimately successful attempt to eliminate the heinous evil of slavery. Yet even the federal government was comparatively tiny then, as compared to the massive, bloated colossus that exists today.  Most of the citizens, North and South, with the blinding exception of slavery, had similar conceptions of how a government and society best functions, as well as the proper relationship of local, state and federal government to the people. Moreover, they almost universally believed in hard work, pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and other ideas now seen as quaint relics of a bygone era. Or worse, as an ethos that somehow coexisted with slavery, and therefore was as bad as slavery.

What is different- and even more troubling now- is that we are no longer held together by any of those beliefs and values. By any realistic measure, the country is far more fractured now than in the Civil War Era, and a possible Reconstruction far less likely. It is not only fractured by one or two huge, core issues, but by several, and by too many less critical issues to count. We are no longer a united people with a common language, culture, history, and lineage. The dirty little secret is that diversity doesn’t make a society whole, it makes it much more difficult for that society not to unravel, more likely for it to devolve into violence and chaos. But the coastal elites don’t care about any of this. They rarely come in contact with anyone who isn’t just like them, if not in appearance and class, at least in thought.

The Founders stated- even before they brought it into being- that a democratic republic could only long exist with a moral people. By that they meant a people who would vote for the good of the nation and not strictly for what might be best for themselves at any given time. And a people who, while in office, would also think only of the country’s well-being, not how best to increase their own wealth and power.

We are no longer those people.

Their design worked for 200-plus years, a people and their government performing better and more benevolently, by almost any measurement, than any that came before or since.

Now, entitled snowflakes riot in the streets if others won’t gladly pay for their abortions or birth control. Faceless bureaucrats sabotage their own president and the will of half of their countrymen, entirely willing- perhaps eager- to bring down a government in order to protect their own hold on power.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me” was the old mantra. Today, many run for a “safe room” if they accidentally hear something they don’t agree with or they think is offensive…if they haven’t prevented that speech from occurring in the first place.

It’s not legal to place a list of the Ten Commandments in a public restroom, but it is legal for a man dressed as a woman to enter a woman’s bathroom.

Slaves would have thought the phrase “All Lives Matter” was the most beautiful they had ever heard. Say that today and you are somehow considered racist…and could be subject to an attack.

United? “Progressives” live to divide. By race, sex/gender, income, age, and anything else they can think of. It is the opposite of e Pluribus unum. Instead of “out of many…one,” they say, “out of one…many.” The Founders built the foundation that the Left is now so gleefully tearing apart.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, George Washington (convention president) used a chair that featured half of a sun on its back splat. When a miraculous breakthrough was achieved near the end of the convention, Benjamin Franklin stood up and said: “I have often looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. Now at length I have the happiness  to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

That sun is now setting.

And if it does go down, it will never rise again.