Fantasy world of U.S. near collapse

Let’s face reality. As a nation, we have been living in a fantasy world for decades. We were told that we could afford social welfare, entitlements, retirement programs, free trade with everyone, and an enormous military (along with dozens of other programs and policies) and we’d never have to worry about paying for them.

We were told that we could absorb millions of immigrants (I’m the son of one, by the way) from alien cultures, many of which had no knowledge of, or love for, our way of life, and no desire to assimilate once here.

We were told that we could and should be the world’s knight in shining armor, that anytime or anywhere “freedom” (as we see it anyways) was threatened that we would defend it, at enormous cost of life and treasure.

But the sands of time have nearly all fallen through the hourglass. We are at the road’s end. We can no longer afford what we do. But people will not hear what they find discomforting. When given a choice between a lie that is easy to swallow or a truth that is hard, sadly most people choose the easy lie.

We have destroyed our culture from within and have allowed it to to be overthrown from without. We are no longer one people, one nation, indivisible. We can’t even agree if there is a God, what marriage is, or when life begins, much less what the economic or political structure of our nation ought to be. Simply put, we have seceded from each other in our hearts and minds.

The great powers and their citizens always think themselves invincible — that they have unlimited wealth and power at their disposal. They never do. And as their nation accumulates more wealth and power, the people, naturally, expect more and more from their state. Yet, as that power wanes and the treasury empties, as the nation slowly bleeds out from policy overreach and unsustainable spending, the people cannot accept a diminished benefit or a lesser global role.

Economies can’t grow forever, and nations rise and fall as the tides of the sea. The people, unwilling to make short-term sacrifices for long-term prosperity, betray their own nation.

We are there. Our power wanes, our influence shrinks, our treasure is spent, and other powers are rising as we slowly descend to mediocrity. As we desperately try to cling to a glorious past, we refuse to do what is necessary to restore ourselves and our nation. As Alexander Tytler once supposedly said, “Democracy can not exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.”  We hate hard choices.  We want to have our cake and eat it too.

And so we will march, ever onward to our own destruction. It has been the fate of every great nation that came before. And just as we did not learn from the mistakes of the powers of the past, the next great nation likely will not learn from ours, doomed to once again repeat the sad cycle of the mighty empires of old: a humble beginning, then glorious expansion and military victory, ending in a long, slow decay into the pages of history, only to be remembered in textbooks as one of many long-dead nations who conquered the world and threw it all away.

Never are great nations destroyed from without, but always from within.  As T.S. Eliot said in “The Hollow Men,” “This is how the world ends, Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

Musso is a resident of Kalispell.