Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : Is There a Point Where the Ideal of America Just Breaks?

I’ve got five alarms and four are going off

You could stare at the sun and say it’s dark.

–Miranda Sound, “Kaleidoscope”–

America, the country, is based on the premise that each of us has the right to pursue our own happiness provided we do not infringe upon the lives or other property of other citizens. Slavery was fuct as was the Jim Crow solution that grew from its ashes into a Civil Rights struggle for independence which has been all but won politically and which is only a few generations away from being overcome socially. What America did to the tribal peoples who inhabited this land before it was founded was an absolute disgrace. And the philosophy of “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace” has literally brought us to the breaking point in the social evolution of our species.

Is there a point where the economic strain, the political strain, and the social strain just make the system break and stop working? Has the word freedom become just another marketing term that we each drink the Kool Aid on because the alternative is too scary. The alternative being that the system is dead and decaying and we’re just the last remaining parasites to realize it.

Who is more foolish–the fool or the fool who follows him?

photo credit: Hryckowian

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Infidel753 Said in August 20th, 2008 @1:43 pm

Your own examples seem to affirm that we are moving forward, not regressing. We went from slavery, to emancipation for black Americans but with gross oppression and limitations of their rights, to the Civil Rights era, to the present situation which is far closer to real racial equality than we’ve ever been before.
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We wiped out most of the Indians. Today we would not do such things.
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Even the Iraq and Afghan wars were fought with much more concern for human life, both of our own troops and of enemy civilians, than most previous wars.
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Women have gained the right to vote, and a woman just got within a hair’s breadth of becoming President (and a black man is now a major-party nominee for President). Laws against homosexuality have been swept away; two states have legalized gay marriage, with more to follow. The efforts of religious fanatics to turn back the clock on abortion rights have, so far, achieved little.
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The internet and other technological advances have made it far easier for ordinary people to share information and organize themselves outside of official channels and in defiance of what “opinion leaders” of all kinds think we ought to be doing.
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I just don’t see how it can be said that we’re going backward.

Josh Said in August 21st, 2008 @5:57 pm

Thanks for the comment, Infidel and the wisdom. There is a vast difference between the reality of the future portrayed on cable news and that presented on The Discovery Channel in HD. Your view is the latter and I trust it.

I also believe that we’re moving forward and try to show it everyday to the people around me. Abstractions are for suckers, right?