Societal Decay – Granite Grok

Decay Point: Bureaucratic Sclerosis

Alas, as a society decays, its parts shrivel and wither in interestingly tragic ways. An exemplar of such decay occurred just the other day. Big Government’s bureaucratic sclerosis hit a Fire Department so hard that it felt it necessary for its, “…22 firefighters and six vehicles…” to remain idle on the shore and watch a man drown in icy water for 13 minutes, according to the Daily Caller. They “…didn’t launch an inflatable boat until just before he disappeared. The firefighters pulled Brown’s body out of the water roughly an hour after they arrived.”

“‘They followed our ice rescue guidelines pretty much to a T,’ Champaign Deputy Fire Chief Eric Mitchell told The News Gazette.”. Whew! Thank goodness. I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be cited for noncompliance. Allay your fears great citizens of Champaign, Illinois, there will be no lawsuits or fines today, only one less citizen, because our Fire Department followed the rules to a “T”. That sounds like a decent trade off, eh?

Decay Point: Anesthetized Youth

by Scott Morales

Societal decay desiccates many if not all of its valuable features. Its atrophic crumble can be seen in desolate neighborhoods, abandoned youth, personal irresponsibility, and blithely glib leadership; its fetid smell wafts from spoiled brats, contagious selfishness, meretricious celebrities and the worshiping thereof, and narcissism; and it is heard in cravenous silence and ghoulishly giddy laughter at the harm of the innocent. At its root, its core, the essence of the decay is the culture itself. Never have I imagined what I saw this morning on YouTube would take place, let alone in this country. Maybe it’s naivete; maybe it’s the pervasiveness of information in the modern age, where these things have always occurred throughout my lifetime but previously I never heard about them unless it was local; or maybe it’s how I grew up and such horrors don’t penetrate my mind voluntarily. But what I saw is truly horrifying, not only in the brutal act itself, but the insouciant laughter and jokes that accompanied the images in the video.

Skip, Freedom Is The Symptom, The People The Cause

by Scott Morales

Skip, true. It is about freedom, but there’s more to it than that. I would suggest that state encroachment on individual liberties is a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. It’s about the people. It’s about people willing to cede their liberty and freedom to a faceless bureaucrat in exchange for the illusion of safety, for a handout, or both. It’s the values that people hold that they place themselves as a pet of the state; they willingly devolve themselves into the Burkean “flies of a summer”.

We’ve raised generations steeped in state dependency, and now we see the result of this societal mistake when there’s a problem. When there’s a problem or a challenge, the first reaction of too many people is to call in the Department of Personal Responsibility Absolution to handle it. They believe that they themselves are uncapable of handling the problem, that it’s somebody else’s responsibility. If there are poor people, the government should handle it. If there are sick people, government should handle it. Elderly, the government should care for them.