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- #21
Personal Opinion:
We have been riding on the back of our victory in WWII for a very, very long time.
The war left us as the only Major Power on the face of the planet which had not suffered grievous damage to our infrastructure and manufacturing plant, and which had not suffered massive civilian casualties alongside its military casualties.
The war fueled our economy in a dozen different ways and propped it up in the postwar years as we floated the 'rebuild' of Europe and several other areas around the world, and as we beat our swords back into plowshares, however imperfectly.
Of course, the advent of the Cold War, and the sporadic outbreak of related Hot Skirmishes, caused us to start spending beyond our means, again, to begin playing World Policeman - given that we were the only ones still capable of fulfilling the role.
But we have been burning through cash and making war on-credit for a long time now in the World Policeman role - and the pseudo-Imperial roles which the Policeman mindset eventually leads to, in small increments - until a nation wakes-up one day to find itself more Imperium than Police Station. I don't think we've sunk quite that far yet, but we may be further along the road to that outcome than we realize without giving it some serious reflection.
Until, it sometimes seems, we can no longer recognize Real Need to Intervene from a sound-byte call-to-arms in today's equivalent of Yellow Journalism rags (and those exist on both the Right AND Left sides of the aisle) planted in those rags by special interest groups.
It seems that we make war at the drop of a hat nowadays, on the thinnest of excuses, for no better reason than because Fearless Leader A or B say we should. And they (leaders) all do it... Left, Right, whatever.
I did find it interesting that the Congress had begun to line itself up, to oppose the President and his Administration's plans to intervene in Syria. I saw that as a hopeful sign of some vague willingness on the part of Congress to begin to revere that war-at-the-drop-of-a-hat trend. But, of course, Vladimir Putin came to the rescue and bailed-out our latest Fearless Leader before the Congress (including one helluva lot of Democrats) could hand him his head back on a platter, in voting-down a Syria adventure.
But, all that aside, on the macro level, and in the final analysis, we are still lurching forward under the momentum of WWII and our victory and the benefits we derived from that victory. But even the colossal advantages gained by a large power remaining intact through a global war - even such a colossal range of advantages are finite, and must come to an end or must level-off and decline, eventually. We're there, and have been already, for some years.
That advantage and that momentum have thinned-out to the point where our forward progress seems to be measured nowadays in fits-and-starts rather than the smoother, more consistent and high-speed progress of those earlier times of the late 1940s and the 1950s and early 1960s.
I, for one, rightly or wrongly, see us in decline in several areas...
* sensible foreign policy, and resultant credibility on the international scene
* manufacturing capability
* macro-level economic planning and oversight and outcomes
* the Middle Class - the economic well-being of the majority of our working-age folk
* healthcare - with more prospect of further degeneration looming on the near horizon
* sensible provision for our poor (safety net)
* popular education
* science, and space exploration and exploitation
* and other things that I'm forgetting as part of a quick bit of morning extempore
I'm also reasonably confident that we will eventually get our heads out of our asses and fix what's wrong, but it's going to take years - decades, maybe.
But first, we have to come to consensus that we are in need of a 'major overhaul' before we can set about doing it.
Given our present-day extreme political polarization, just reaching consensus on the need to fix things might prove to be the most difficult early challenge that we need to master.
Or so it seems to this observer.
We have been riding on the back of our victory in WWII for a very, very long time.
The war left us as the only Major Power on the face of the planet which had not suffered grievous damage to our infrastructure and manufacturing plant, and which had not suffered massive civilian casualties alongside its military casualties.
The war fueled our economy in a dozen different ways and propped it up in the postwar years as we floated the 'rebuild' of Europe and several other areas around the world, and as we beat our swords back into plowshares, however imperfectly.
Of course, the advent of the Cold War, and the sporadic outbreak of related Hot Skirmishes, caused us to start spending beyond our means, again, to begin playing World Policeman - given that we were the only ones still capable of fulfilling the role.
But we have been burning through cash and making war on-credit for a long time now in the World Policeman role - and the pseudo-Imperial roles which the Policeman mindset eventually leads to, in small increments - until a nation wakes-up one day to find itself more Imperium than Police Station. I don't think we've sunk quite that far yet, but we may be further along the road to that outcome than we realize without giving it some serious reflection.
Until, it sometimes seems, we can no longer recognize Real Need to Intervene from a sound-byte call-to-arms in today's equivalent of Yellow Journalism rags (and those exist on both the Right AND Left sides of the aisle) planted in those rags by special interest groups.
It seems that we make war at the drop of a hat nowadays, on the thinnest of excuses, for no better reason than because Fearless Leader A or B say we should. And they (leaders) all do it... Left, Right, whatever.
I did find it interesting that the Congress had begun to line itself up, to oppose the President and his Administration's plans to intervene in Syria. I saw that as a hopeful sign of some vague willingness on the part of Congress to begin to revere that war-at-the-drop-of-a-hat trend. But, of course, Vladimir Putin came to the rescue and bailed-out our latest Fearless Leader before the Congress (including one helluva lot of Democrats) could hand him his head back on a platter, in voting-down a Syria adventure.
But, all that aside, on the macro level, and in the final analysis, we are still lurching forward under the momentum of WWII and our victory and the benefits we derived from that victory. But even the colossal advantages gained by a large power remaining intact through a global war - even such a colossal range of advantages are finite, and must come to an end or must level-off and decline, eventually. We're there, and have been already, for some years.
That advantage and that momentum have thinned-out to the point where our forward progress seems to be measured nowadays in fits-and-starts rather than the smoother, more consistent and high-speed progress of those earlier times of the late 1940s and the 1950s and early 1960s.
I, for one, rightly or wrongly, see us in decline in several areas...
* sensible foreign policy, and resultant credibility on the international scene
* manufacturing capability
* macro-level economic planning and oversight and outcomes
* the Middle Class - the economic well-being of the majority of our working-age folk
* healthcare - with more prospect of further degeneration looming on the near horizon
* sensible provision for our poor (safety net)
* popular education
* science, and space exploration and exploitation
* and other things that I'm forgetting as part of a quick bit of morning extempore
I'm also reasonably confident that we will eventually get our heads out of our asses and fix what's wrong, but it's going to take years - decades, maybe.
But first, we have to come to consensus that we are in need of a 'major overhaul' before we can set about doing it.
Given our present-day extreme political polarization, just reaching consensus on the need to fix things might prove to be the most difficult early challenge that we need to master.
Or so it seems to this observer.
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