They say that the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. Well, here is the problem: Americans, as a people, no longer love Liberty. Black, White, Red, Brown, Yellow, gun owner, businessman, student, teacher, you, me, and everyone else has let our love of Liberty be subjugated by our fear of disapproval.
It's not entirely our fault; we are a generous people. We are fully aware of our prosperity, and we are driven by our national character to want to help those in need by sharing it. We want to feed the hungry, help the impoverished, and heal the sick.What other nation has been able to make hated enemies into valued allies? When, in history, has another nation done so much for those that had done nothing for them? Our compassion has been our strength.
And therein lies our weakness.
Those that seek to fundamentally change America have all but succeeded, and they used our best qualities against us. Since they believe that enlightened self-interest is evil, they have sought to eliminate it and, by extension, any regard for the individual's rights in favor of a convoluted collectivism that is rooted in envy and hatred.
Envy, for instance, is exhibited when a man goes to college, works his ass off to get good grades, enters the business world and sacrifices his social life, maybe a marriage or two, and a significant percentage of health and well-being, in order to rise to the top of his industry. He works for a corporation and brings in hundreds of millions in profit, and is rewarded with bonuses in the amount of double-digit millions, and those petty little minds that can't even conceive of copying that path label him as "the 1%" which, in Progressivespeak, is a euphemism for "evil."
In spite of the thousands of jobs he has created, the improvements in the quality of life, contribution to the dynamism of the economy, or the astronomical amount of tax revenue generated by his efforts, he isn't held up as an example for others to follow. Instead, he is vilified by collectivists for being greedy, by the church for being materialistic, by those of lesser ambition for being obsessive, or by those of his own racial demographic for selling out. Moreover, any efforts he makes to include and benefit the aforementioned groups is seen as pandering.
Hatred was evidenced just recently when Ben Shapiro spoke at California State University- Los Angeles . People that wanted nothing more than to listen to his speech were blocked from entering the building, in some cases, violently, while those of opposing viewpoints stood outside chanting. Ironically, colleges and universities used to be places where intellectuals could debate the merits of different ideas, keeping what they found valuable and discarding the rest. Now? Now they're nothing more than indoctrination centers bent on filling young minds with collectivist propaganda, and suppressing dissent by any means necessary.
Add to this the total domination of popular culture by those that hate America, combined with the utter refusal of conservatives to engage it, and you have what amounts to a one-sided war for the soul of this nation; our young people. Young people are more in tune with the world around them than ever before. With the myriad of electronic devices, and the all-pervasive social media, every young person from Middle School up can access amounts of information their parents never imagined. Despite its banality, pop culture is a powerful force in this country. Think of the thousands of hours young people devote to searching the internet, playing video games, or listening to music, and you begin to understand how someone who grew up in a Christian Conservative family can develop some controversial ideas.
Conservatives make disapproving clucking noises and do nothing. We don't like Hollywood, but we offer no alternatives. We hate the disgusting lyrics in music, but we do not cultivate talent more to our liking. We disparage 'Fifty Shades of Grey' but we don't publish anything worth reading. We rage against the education machine, but we continue to send our children there, and we do nothing to change it or provide an affordable alternative. Our nation is shifting towards totalitarianism, and we stand there like a witness to a horrific auto accident; we don't want to see it, we can't look away, and we don't know what to do to fix it.
The reasons that this societal shift has taken place would, and has, filled volumes. The infantilization of men, the domination of the culture, the demonization of the productive class, all geared towards fundamentally changing the system, has been done before. Hitler did it, Lenin did it, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, all of the worst despots in history started out by fomenting hatred and envy against those that made up the productive class. They co-opted the young through the education institutions, and they made it all seem adventurous and romantic to "join the revolution." And when they finally took power, they killed, and killed, and killed until there were, literally, rivers of blood and mountains of corpses. They killed the productive class, they killed those that opposed them, and they killed a large portion of the academics and revolutionaries that helped them, all in the name of solidifying their power and securing an iron fist around the nation.
The reason this was possible was because they had no one that was willing to resist in sufficient numbers to be effective, largely because the over-educated and the under-educated both bought into the rhetoric, and those in between were too busy with the mechanics of day-to-day living to pay more than cursory attention to the situation until it was too late.
As Americans, we like to believe that we are different, immune to the foibles that brought down other people. We fail to realize that those that seek to dominate us understand us better than we understand ourselves. They understand the one major flaw in our national character:
We want to be liked more than we want to make hard decisions.
We would rather send billions of dollars abroad to fund countries that hate us, than rebuild a crumbling infrastructure. We would rather tax the middle class into extinction, than cut welfare benefits to illegal aliens. We would rather allow regulatory agencies to run roughshod over farmers and ranchers in the name of environmentalism, than allow them to produce, even if it means they grow a few too many apples, or collect rainwater on their own land.
The culmination of all of these elements is an era of self-loathing so acute as to be fatal. We have been conditioned to hate our prosperity, our Constitution, even The Founders of this nation, instead believing that the solution to the country's ills can be found in politicians spouting the same, tired platitudes that, throughout history, have led nations to ruin.
