The Day America Died?

Guest post from John Wilder at Wilder Wealthy Wise.

“1996 is the past too, listen to me!” – 12 Monkeys

Chuck Norris was dropped twice as a child:  once on Hiroshima, once on Nagasaki.

Pugsley and I were off driving to an event today.  As we motored down the road, he said, “Hey, what were the 1990’s like?  I was on YouTube® and saw some commercials from then.”

I paused.  Since he was born after the 1990s, it was absolutely foreign to him, except as he had seen in media and popular culture.  But how to describe it?  I mean, the Dole/Kemp ’96 website is still up (LINK), which is convenient, since Bob is now 96.  But the 1990s was so much more than that.

“Well, we had won the Cold War.  The 1970’s were about the economic wreckage from the oil shocks and inflation from removing gold backing to the dollar.  The 1980’s were the last stage in the Cold War – the idea of nuclear war being 45 minutes away from ending civilization was common.”

I skipped mentioning that we’d come within a single person’s decision to launch nuclear weapons and start a world war more than once.  I didn’t want to put him in the mindset of a total war.  Heck, let him have his own ex-wife.

“The 1990s saw the end of the Cold War when the Soviet economy collapsed.  We had, to a certain extent, defined ourselves by our enemy.  In some sense, American mean not a Soviet communist.  But then, we won.  It was all over.”

Joe Biden knows in his heart that he is the only one who can defeat Ronald Reagan this November.

I paused, thinking about the old Mark Twain line that most people can’t tell a good thing from a bad thing, but kept going.

“We then looked around and wondered who we were, since there weren’t any Soviet communists to not-be.  I think the answer we came up with was that we were shoppers.  The purpose of America was to be the site of endless suburbs surrounding cool shopping malls.  Heck, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Mall of America® opened in 1992.”

Looking back, I am in awe of how innocent we were, how free of strife we were – the First Gulf War took months to prepare for, but only had about 96 hours of actual ground combat with 156 Americans killed in battle.  To put that in perspective, 65 troops died in the Gulf from accidents during that same time.  The first Gulf War was about as lopsided as a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.

“It was unique, because the United States was sitting alone as a superpower both economically and militarily.  The country was prosperous.  We were even closer to a balanced budget than we ever have been since Andrew Jackson was president.  I think Americans began to miss the struggle.  Rock music went from a joyous celebration of freedom and beer and girls in bikinis and Cherry Pie to complaints about teenage angst.”

I didn’t jump into discussions of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.).

Kurt Cobain has now been drug-free for 26 years!

“Somewhere in there, we had a chance to look deep inside ourselves to find our soul as a nation.  Religion seemed hard, so we decided the answer was Twizzlers®.”

What I didn’t say was that was the beginning of tearing the nation apart.  By the time George W. Bush beat Al Gore in an election that was so close it went to court, the Left felt that they had the presidency stolen from them.  That, along with the Clinton Impeachment, rubbed the Left raw so by 2000 they were madder than Dick Cheney on a dove hunt.

I suppose that the 1990s were also the last stage of the innocence in America, and the slide into terminal decline began here.  Sure, we’d already gone from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in the 1960s to “I Wanna **** You Like An Animal” in the 1990s, but in 1996 an actual American President, a Democrat, thought that marriage was something for a man and a woman to do.

The Mrs. thinks I’m crazy, forgetting she’s the one that married me.

Wild stock swings, a housing crisis, and wars that kept tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade followed, and the great rift I have written about in numerous posts (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg) widened.

But all of that is prelude to the Day America Died:  May 28, 2020.  Sure, the time of death is up for debate.  And everything looks the same, taxes will be due next month, and the ammunition and bagel shop still accepts United States Federal Reserve currency.

Inertia is like that.  The old forms persist, even after the reason that they were invented disappeared.  Even after the Greeks took over Egypt, they still used the term Pharaoh.  The Senate of Rome ceased to be the Senate, but managed to stay in existence until at least 600 A.D., long after the fall of Rome.  I still own a comb.

Like I said, I still own the comb.  I just can’t part with it.

On May 28, however, the Third Precinct building in Minneapolis was burned down.  The revolution may not be televised, but it certainly is being live streamed.  From there, protests, riots, and looting spread to dozens of cities in the United States, and even across the world.  Certainly, there were peaceful protests as well, but the vision we’ll remember was burning, looting, and destruction of public and private property.

It was and is obvious that the goal of the Left is simple:  they want to burn it all down, every system, so that they can fundamentally transform the country as a whole.  Transform into what?  The hints aren’t even subtle:  the “Green New Deal” combined with a wholesale rewrite of the history and legends that define America and “free” healthcare and money.  The old America, the one that named an airport after John Wayne?  That’s not “who we are.”  Free speech that goes against the narrative of the Left?  Also not “who we are.”

The Right seems to be done, too.  The systems that should remove illegal aliens, don’t.  They Constitution seems to be guided by “emanations and penumbras” that allow the meanings of words to take the exact opposite meaning when used in reality.  For some reason, “sex” as written in 1965 was interpreted to include transgenderism which means the exact opposite of natural sex.  One thing I’m certain of:  in 1965 when they wrote the law, “sex” meant “transgender” to exactly zero lawmakers.

It seems as though the Supreme Court forgot that there is, sitting right near their own building, a whole other building full of people who could easily clear that up:  Congress.  But that seems unlikely, so the Supreme Court can just make up stuff if they want to.  Because of nonsense like that, the Right is also done.

So, I was hopeful the Center hadn’t given up.  I have a good friend who is more libertarian (small “L”) and he and I were chatting the other day.  “They should vote all of them (Congress, President, all of them) out.”  I wasn’t expecting this from him.  But the Center is done, too.   The Left is mad at Trump.  The Right is mad at AOC, and the Center just wants everyone to shut up so they can grill in peace.

One time when we were backpacking the fire got away from us in camp.  It was in-tents. 

But belief is really important.  We obey laws, at least in part, because we believe that we’ll be punished if we don’t.  We trade dollars back and forth with each other for stuff because we believe that the dollars are money.  We have a nation because we believe in it.

The math is simple.  As soon as we stop believing that we have a nation, as soon as that faith dies away, we no longer have a nation.  And by my guess, I’d say we lost that faith on May 28.  Are police required for a country?  No.  We lived until 1834 before the first police force that looked like a modern unit was formed.  Before then, it was a hodge-podge of volunteer day and night “watches” that looked for bad guys or danger combined with county sheriffs.  Thing Mayberry, but with a lot more booze.

But law enforcement is required.  If it doesn’t exist, citizens will protect themselves.  The era of the rooftop Korean and the Modern Sporting Lawyer arrives once again.  People will very quickly understand that in the absence of police that violence levels, especially in Leftist areas with restrictive gun laws, will skyrocket.

The other day I got bitten by a radioactive lawyer – I now have Power of Attorney.

That lack of belief in government is happening now.  Maybe worrying about nuclear war wasn’t so bad after all?

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