I Want a Life Preserver of My Own

It's been an ongoing theme here: The system's broken, the occupants are happily breaking it, and everything's going to come crashing down.

On the one hand, as commenter Fred Everett said at a post at Protein Wisdom:

(E)very generation, feels like the "wheels are coming off" in some sense.

On the other hand, as Billy Beck retorted:

Yup. But you know what?

Every now and then, they're right about it.

I take some comfort in the fact that H.L. Mencken, Will Rogers and Mark Twain spoke and joked about how everything was going to hell in a handbasket back in the 20's and 30's. I don't feel so sanguine when I realize that seventy-plus years later all we've seen is further decay.

We're at war with a loosely associated group of fanatics, many of whom are willing to die in order to kill us and tear down our civilization, and our reaction? Half the population seems to believe that if we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone. Never mind that Iran and North Korea want (or may have) nukes. Never mind that nearly every day in Iraq or Afghanistan, some jihadi happily sends his soul to Allah just so he can kill some infidels, and he'd love to do it in the heart of the "Great Satan."

Some of us understand the stakes. Most of them seem to be on the pointy end of the stick. Back here in Disneyland, though, the remainder are called "chickenhawks" - or worse.

The November elections have been taken by our political masters as a consensus vote on the war in Iraq, although Joe Lieberman won his race based on his support for that war. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to the fact that the Republicans lost. They gave it away by pissing off the people who voted them into power in the first place. Most of the Democrat victories were by default. But now the Dems control both houses of Congress, and are hell-bent (words chosen carefully) on pushing their agenda.

From my perspective, that agenda is perfectly illustrated by that Far Side cartoon above. We're all merrily running for the sea. Those not so inclined are being swept along anyway.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of standing up and trying to get people to look. I'm tired of "Global Warming" - the next boogeyman the people who believe that only an all-powerful State can save us from certain destruction (though many will unfortunately have to be sacrificed, of course - eggs and omlettes, you understand) are pushing as the excuse to control our lives. I'm tired of the War on Terror - to some extent a boogeyman itself - being used to build the mechanisms that can (and will eventually) be used to the same end. I'm tired of the War on (some) Drugs™ being used to disembowel the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. I'm tired of politicians butchering the First Amendment. I'm tired of the Courts eviscerating the Second. I'm tired of our institutions of "higher learning" turning out ignorant but politically correct useful idiots in an endless cycle that ever more resembles the swirling of a toilet bowl.

In short, I'm tired of watching Western Civilization commit seppuku with a dull, rusty spoon. No ceremony. No hope of restored honor. No hope.

Half of me wants to help pull it all down just to get it over with. The other half wants the world to go on so that my grandchildren can have a good life of their own. I understand that most of the people on this planet live in poverty, and that we here in the United States have built a society where very, very few live in anything even resembling the squalor that the majority of humanity considers "normal." I refuse to feel guilty for this. I refuse to calulate my "carbon footprint." I refuse to recycle anything but aluminum cans (the only thing that makes economic sense to recycle.) I don't want my grandchildren to have to live like the majority of the planet just to make it "fair."

Call me selfish. I don't give a shit. I don't want a life preserver, I want a life BOAT.