Life Lessons
An Unimaginable Future
By Howie Doyle
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Howie
Doyle |
We Americans, we Texans, are becoming that in
name only. We have forgotten what got us here. Our
civil liberties have been redefined, and the
sometimes harsh concept of personal responsibility
has been hijacked by feel-good government pandering
and political appeasement. Now we must live by a new
set of rules in a world that is changing at the
speed of blight.
The rights of the individual are eroding just as
quickly as that same individual’s responsibilities
are being forgiven and usurped by the government.
Our country was founded as a democratic republic
(using a specific form called, “representative
democracy”) in which the democracy provides for the
will of the majority, while the republic protects
the freedoms of the individual. The founding fathers
based our rule of law on Christian principals while
seeking to ensure that the church would not run the
state. When in balance, these seemingly disparate
forces create stability. While writing this I looked
up “unstable element,” looking for a molecular
metaphor, and I found it. An atom’s nucleus is kept
whole by two main interactions: NN force and Coulomb
force. NN force is more powerful when protons and
neutrons are close together; Coulomb force becomes
more powerful when they move apart. When these
particles don’t behave well together the nucleus
begins to disintegrate, a process known as decay,
during which the atom spews radioactive
contamination.
Unstable atoms fall apart faster than stable
ones. They have a high rate of decay, and they
create a lot of contamination. Although I think our
country’s nucleus is unstable, another law of
physics is that the half-life of a specific atom
cannot be predicted; its course of time is random.
Perhaps Ben Franklin said it best in an address
to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when he
avowed his agreement with the Constitution, with all
its faults, because a general government is
necessary, and that any well administered government
can be a blessing to the people; but he added that
he believed that it would likely be administered
well for a course of years before “the people shall
become so corrupted as to need despotic government,
being incapable of any other.”
Decay: stealing, lying, cheating, greed.
Contamination: chat rooms, genetic engineering,
chemical mood elevation. Corruption: white-collar
crime, Columbine-style killings, crack ghettos,
identity theft, and the celebration of our
sicknesses.
We won’t allow students to view classical nude
art by the old masters, yet we provide them Internet
connections in our schools where graphic sexual
images are only a click away.
We won’t allow restaurant owners to set their own
policies on smoking and live with the consequences
to their bottom line.
We circumvent the letter and spirit of the
Constitution in myriad different ways, and in just
as many ways we protect and reward mediocrity. We
enforce our laws selectively. We put hobbles on the
religion of our forebears, allowing all others to
run free in principal and practice.
We have stripped the institutions of marriage and
family with the privileges they once enjoyed. All
roles of the nuclear family have been dissected and
outsourced so that we can squeeze more entitlement
and enjoyment out of this day, this hour, this
minute.
We are addicted to oil, yet we won’t allow it to
be freely produced on our own shores. We are paying
for the lives of salmon and seabirds with those of
our sons. Our Congress votes in majority to send us
to war, then panders to a public that loses its
resolve when the going gets tough. We won’t even
protect our own borders.
Guess what? It’s not about the size of the dog in
the fight; it’s about the size of the fight in the
dog. We have broken our own will.
What happened to us? We used to be strong. We
used to make decisions based on our ideals and
values. We used to balance compassionate public aid
with resources; now politicians balance it with poll
results and borrow against tomorrow’s plausible
deniability.
We gratify the now. We increase the credit line,
live like rock stars, graze on media soundbites,
pencil in condemnation of the way the world is, and
paint the future of our children and grandchildren
with the blood that is on our hands... but we can’t
see it. We’re colorblind.
When reality hits we knock it back with pills. We
can’t do anything about it anyway. Big Brother is
running the show now. Maybe we subconsciously want
despotic government?
I guess 200-plus years was a pretty good run. I
try to ponder what could be next, but I recoil. It
is unimaginable.
Do you think I’m wrong? Prove it.
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