Arrogance

 

 

Not Even God Himself Can Sink The Titanic!   I can't help but wonder how many times later in his life the man that coined that phrase thought about that boast and cringed.  We have learned many things from that supposedly impossible disaster and ships have become much harder to sink.  The only thing that doesn't seem to be much improved in the time since is that one unknown quantity - Man.  Somehow we still manage to pile shipwrecks up on the rocks, or into the nearest bridge or just manage to inexplicably send them to the bottom with a resounding "Oops."  And somehow we still manage to be astonished when the inevitable happens.

Ah... the arrogance of man in his ability to wreck ships and empires in apparent utter astonishment.  Like "unsinkable ships" many great empires have come and gone, all the while thinking themselves to be the last great Empire.  The national proclamation of each of these seems almost a cliche: "Rome will last for a thousand years!"   "If Britain lasts for a thousand years men will still say...Blah blah blah..."  And why "A thousand years?"  It must just be a good round number to fill out another fine platitude, but I digress.

So each of the great empires have come and gone, and each time apparently to the complete astonishment of it's citizen's and their great, wise, and fearless leaders.  One after another have arisen from the ashes of those before, and often upon those ashes of their pompous predecessors that they themselves reduced to ashes.  And the one common factor that each seemed to share was the utter assurance that they could never fall, as virtually all before them had.

Which brings us to ourselves.  The United States of America.  How are we different from the other great ostensibly invincible empires that now exist only in history books and rubble laden tourist attractions?  Now just stop! Before you click away thinking "Oh no, another Glen Beck sycophant channeling the ghost of conspiracy theorists past,"  just stop and really think about the question.  I am not going to bore you yet again with all of the signs that we are gleefully racing over the cliff on our way to a Marxist hell.  There are plenty of blogs to pummel you with enough facts and hyperbole of our imminent demise to filibuster Congress for all eternity.  I just really would like an answer as to why people of every political bent seem to find the very real prospect of The United States in it's current form ceasing to exist altogether an impossibility.  Sure, there are plenty of folks wringing there hands and blathering on about "the world a changin and goin to hell in a hand basket."  But who really believes that we could one day be subjects of a Socialist, Fascist or other tyrannical dictatorship, or that we could have breadlines and large numbers of people actually starving to death in "America?"

It is easy to forget that the imminent demise of this country has been on it's porch many times before.  We forget that only a few generations before us the north and south halves of this country were assiduously attempting to bludgeon each other into submission or oblivion.

What makes us different than these other great and ostensibly invincible empires?  Are we really more powerful than any of our predecessors?  Are we so powerful we cannot be brought down by any military might?  Is it so implausible that someone could detonate an atomic bomb within our borders?  It has been done before, and not by a country run by madmen who think that they are fulfilling prophecy in doing so.  Is it so unthinkable that in a country where it's stock market was recently cut in half that an economic catastrophe could topple us like a house of cards?  Is it that we are "Too Big To Fail?

So as in Millennia past, nothing has really changed.  We have a mighty empire haughty and drunk on it's own power and prestige.  We have precarious economic upheaval and disarray, and unfathomable debt,  political fractures disemboweling our soul, and a few crazy bearded men in dirty robes and sandals standing on street corners ranting and holding signs that proclaim to anyone that will hear them that "The End is Near."  We have their counterparts on national television daily backing up their own "wild claims" with a constant barrage of facts, and we roll our eyes and tune them out, and resign them to the scrapheap of mildly interesting oddities.  We don't really give the question any real consideration.  Perhaps it is really too implausible; perhaps too frightening.  We don't think much of Rome; an empire much like our own, that never was overthrown, but rather fell from within under the weight of it's own arrogance.

So I ask you once again: how are we different? What have we really learned? Why are we immune to the fate of virtually all that have gone before us?