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Old 06-23-2020, 04:29 PM
 
Location: Berwick, Penna.
16,214 posts, read 11,282,540 times
Reputation: 20827

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The United States of America is at war, as surely as if we had endured another suprise attack like the one at Pearl Harbor nearly eighty years ago, or the World Trade Center sixty years later. But facing up to this most recent challenge won't require our sons and daughters to enlist in some militarized regimen, or to accept any form of sacrifice on a home front. What it will require is a thorough examination, from each of us, of our own conscience.

Spiritual values often added to the picture, but the American experiment was driven primarily by material want; To escape the stagnation and class-consciousness of European societal structure, people endured the dangers and privations of a long sea voyage, only to face similar privations while building a primitive home in hostile territory, and often, after paying for their passage via the most demanding, and demeaning physical labor. Still, the enterprise continued to develop.

And in a world where virtually every society relied upon servitude in some form, it was inevitable that, while efforts among the enlightened minority to abolish the practice were already under way, slavery, reinforced by race and color lines, made its way to British colonial shores. It took almost 250 years and hundreds of thousands of lives to correct that mistake, but corrected it was, in the long run.

There was also the embarrassment of the taking of valuable land from a nation unable to sufficiently militarize and defend itself -- be it Mexico, Spain, or the native tribes, But the pressures behind this have been there since the dawn of history, and in every corner of the globe. We can acknowledge this via the 20/20 vision of hindsight, but little more.

Next came industrialization; but an emerging technical advance never refines itself without a price in safety. In one week in the dismal winter of 1907, over one thousand men died mining coal. But the flood of misery and suffering continued to recede -- driven by the simple fact that the value of the lives of individual workers rose along with their productivity.

And by this time, the mechanism for the resolution of economic conflict had emerged in America, as was happening in every developing society. It is most worthy of note that among the 15-or-so nations regarded as "tested" democracies (100 or more years of the sharing and transfer of power by peaceful means alone), no member of that group has taken up the sword against another member in the past 200 years.

But in this time of unprecedented cooperation between sovereign nations, and unprecedented material prosperity guaranteed (and shared) via the mechanism of open markets and recognized, tested financial institutions and practices, the voices of the disenchanted are still there. We hear calls for "reparations" (anyone who has read of the bitterness after World War I should see where that leads), and calls for "redistribution" (without recognizing that forced liquidation of the perceived wealth in any equity threatens the value of all equity). And that approach eventually threatens the strength of many non-profit and philanthropic institutions.

And since most efforts along these lines are usually rebuffed by the simple recognition of their own folly, the latter-day barbarians have taken to attempts to re-write history as a last resort.

So If the European system that piled up about 100 million corpses between 1914 and 1945 is your idea of a better way, feel free to join it. Or make the trip into town from your parents' suburban castle and do your damnedest on the streets, boys and girls; you're only retarding your own (and everyone else's) progress.

Last edited by 2nd trick op; 06-23-2020 at 04:59 PM..
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Old 06-23-2020, 04:42 PM
 
3,346 posts, read 2,176,270 times
Reputation: 5723
My TL;DR here is "We, especially the Mighty United States, were doing just fine until these malcontents got tired of being abused to death for trivial or imaginary offenses, so <<bleep>> them."


Last edited by mensaguy; 06-23-2020 at 05:21 PM.. Reason: Totally unacceptable language
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