Our civilization deserves to fail

This sort of trivia is now the rule, not the exception in politics. As America’s problems have gotten bigger and more intractable, our politicians have created phony problems to solve instead of dealing with real issues. They may not care if North Korea can hit America with a nuclear weapon or whether Social Security will still exist in its current form in a decade, but they can talk your ears off about the women’s dress code, civil war statues and the name of the Washington Redskins. Unfortunately, our Congress is a reflection of our culture which prizes celebrity, outrageous behavior, attention whoring and meaningless expressions of how much people claim to care above all other things. There was a time when being a jerk prone to emotional outbursts of nonsense was looked down upon, but today it means you get a reality show at best and a bigger Twitter following at worst.

There are still a lot of good people in this country, but as a nation, we’ve become complacent, decadent and jaded. We’re the trust fund kid living off the money great, great-grandad left us while the family business we don’t understand fails. What we have in America? It’s rare. Historically, there are not a lot of extremely prosperous, free nations that don’t have to fear invasion because of that powerful military. That means we are squandering an inheritance left to us by previous generations of Americans that we may never have again once it’s lost. We foolishly assume it will be this good forever even though we laugh at and impugn many of the ideas, attitudes and principles that were responsible for our success in the first place. America is not on track for a happy ending and as much as I hate to say it, we’re going to richly deserve the pain, misery and disaster our own actions are going to bring down on our heads one day.