Confessions of an Unrepentant Realist - Part 1 - Granite Grok

Confessions of an Unrepentant Realist – Part 1

Credit: anomalousmaterial.com

It’s the precedent of the seizing of Cypriot assets that alarms me.  I’m hearing from news anchors that, “it can’t happen here”, from pundits that, “it can’t happen here” and that, “America is too strong, it’ll never happen. We’re different.”

But, unfortunately for me, I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe Americans are immune from the plagued darkness history can drape over a civilization.  I’m sure the Greeks, Romans, and other elite states believed their status among the world they knew would remain an ever expanding fielded plateau never to drop off.  It didn’t dawn on them that they were simply resting at history’s pleasure on the tip of an acutely receding pinnacle.  Some were more of a relaxed, obtuse slope gently, but surely, declining. Regardless, in time the Romans et al. breathed the sour air of a barren valley and so I fear will America.

When I see these steps, these endless precedents of state expansion and new state power marching on one by one by one, one after another, after another, I can’t help but think we’re on the cusp.

More troubling still is that the Paul Reveres sounding the alarm are viewed by the crowd to be simply paranoid cursed Cassandras.  We’re told it’s not bad, our lamplight message is dim, unfounded, and mistaken; told that our hearts are twisted and evil with a secret agenda, or that we are deluded or are hampered by some mental affliction that makes us viscerally dislike those tending the helm.

I wish I could believe them.  That it’s some character flaw which is the reason I see these things in a historically miasmatic context, portending suffering and hardship.

I’ve tried. I’ve tried to ignore the crunch of the marching boots on pavement.  I’ve tried a little escape into the inane, ignoring the events of the day, and embracing a self-induced myopia.  It didn’t last.  When I happened to catch a glimmer of another event, another symptom of decay and collapse, I told to myself that it’s happened before. That I’m just aware of it now because of the information age in which we live.  I knew what I was doing.  I knew I was ignoring reality and just pretending.

Because they march.  One by one by one, they march.  I can only say such things to myself for the first few steps, after that I abandoned the pretending.

It’s in the aggregate that the march is unnerving.  If it was just one thing, just one symptom.  The doubling of gas prices for example or the bawdy interplay spun as entertainment on prime time family hour, it wouldn’t be unnerving, just simply sad.

But in the aggregate those things with the very real unprecedented debt, decayed cities, no-go zones in our urban areas and border regions, corrupt local municipal officials insouciantly fleecing their neighbors, the shallow idolatry of meretricious harlots, spoiled and ridiculously praised indolent and irreverent children, and the systemic disregard and immaturity reverberating throughout our society is just but a few symptoms.  It’s not just economic but cultural rot.  The complete list of symptoms continues to unravel as if it was scrawled on an ever unfolding ribbon like the one clasped in the bald eagle’s beak on the Seal of the United States, only this one is badly blighted reading only “e pluribus” and so ingloriously long that its weight bows the white head towards the earth, preventing flight, suggesting ignominy.

 To be continued…

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