August 5 2017
AMERICA: A NATION IN DECLINE?
Half of our immediate family lives in the USA. Of our 5 children 2 make their home there; of our 13 grandchildren 7 work or study there. Of our two greatgrandchildren, each country hosts one, so it is about even between it and Canada.
The USA has always been attractive to others, perhaps because it always was a trendsetter: the telephone was invented there and more recently so were the Internet, Google, Facebook and Apple, all setting the tone in communications.
On two occasions America’s intervention was the deciding factor in global cliffhanger situations: in 1917 when it entered the war against Germany and its troops changed the outcome and again in December 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the USA fought on two fronts, giving priority to Europe.
Just as it pioneered modern progress the United States of America is now leading the world into decline in spite of current good economic conditions. And Donald J. Trump is the catalyst there. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” is an indirect admission that God no longer is blessing America as he used to do in the heydays of old, when General Motors fully manufactured half of the autos bought there, and the UAW, the United Automobile Workers called the shots, with a guaranteed annual wage and full pensions and health benefits.
Through the Marshall Plan the USA gave billions of dollars to help its former enemy and set Europe on the path to prosperity. That was then, the glorious fifties and sixties, when America was really great and a force for good.
The paradox today is that “to make America great again” Trump is pursuing the exact opposite. Now, in the most decisive war ever, the fight that will decide the fate of the world, the struggle against CLIMATE CHANGE, the USA has decided not only not to participate but even to exacerbate this ever more dangerous situation. The USA wants more economic growth and sees Climate protection as an impediment, as an enemy to prosperity.
How totally stupid.
Economic development always has come at a cost. Growth and wealth today is increasingly based on borrowed money, used to purchase something now against the uncertain promise of paying it back in the future.
Growth has especially been at the expense of the environment, now causing changes which are impossible to reverse. The ever higher living standards rely on the unrestricted use of underpriced, finite resources, especially water and energy, which have been exploited without concern about conservation for future use.
Oh, Wisdom, where art Thou?
That the USA is on decline was foreseen by Paul Kennedy, a Yale University historian. He, in his classic THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT POWERS, written in 1989, in its introduction, says something that relates directly to the USA today, ”Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on “security,” and thereby divert potential resources from “investment” and compound their long-term dilemma.”
That’s exactly what the Trump budget proposes: a$30 billion increase in ‘defense’ spending, reducing support for the needy, the bulk of whom supported the president.
Yes, Donald Trump’s promise to make America great again is indeed a tacit acknowledgement that the United States is a power in decline, long reflected in the Vietnam disaster and today evident in the unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war on drugs where now more people than ever before are dying of ODs.
These events point to exaggerated views on what America can do: it portrays a sense of hubris, a lack of measure, an unrealistic expectation in what armed responses can accomplish.
This is coming to a head in Washington, where the State Department – in other countries called The Foreign Office – the diplomatic arm of the USA, is being gutted and where now career soldiers – my generals, as Trump calls them -call the shots. Soldiers are dangerous people: they kill: that’s their inclination and occupation.
A military dictatorship.
Here’s what I think happened earlier this week when Trump needed a new Chief of Staff and approached General Kelly.
I think Gen. Kelly made a few conditions. He’s no fool, unlike his boss. Here’s what he told Trump: “I accept, but first Saramucci, that foul mouth, has to go,” to which Trump replied, “OK”.
Next, as a straight shooter the general probably said. “Here is my other condition. If you fire me or force me to resign, the other two generals plus the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, will leave as well, making it difficult for you to continue.”
Trump, desperate, accepted, which could well mean that, in essence, the USA now has a military dictatorship.
Let`s face it: basically Trump is a MONEY MAN. He is not a politician, he is not a mediator, he’s not a person who tries to persuade people by pointing to reason and seeking a wise middle ground, which is what politics is all about: he only sees two things: himself and his family.
He totally lacks maturity and has not a grain of wisdom. That he is revered by a third of the US population is both frightening and revealing: frightening because they share and admire his nihilism, his psychic void of conscience and morals; revealing, because it shows the total absence of genuine religious insight among his followers.
Here is a thought.
I believe that the present day political play in the USA can be traced to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed when he was a visiting scholar at Union Seminary in 1939. He then stated that, “America has not seen a Reformation.”
Here are his exact words:
“God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God”.
500 years ago Luther stirred up the religious scene of his time in a small town in East Germany, called WITTENBERG, where he challenged the all-powerful church, the institution which dominated ALL OF LIFE then. His action has had an immense influence on Europe, an impact that has lasted until today.
Thanks to Luther taking on – with the help of God – the Religious Monopoly of that day, Europe became more ‘people’ oriented, resulting in SOCIALISM, with its CHRISTIAN basis.
The word SOCIALISM has as root the Latin word ‘socius’ which means companion, associate, and indicate concern for one’s neighbor.
The essence of Christianity can be formulated in TEN words:
“LOVE GOD’S EARTH ABOVE ALL AND ONE’S NEIGHBOR AS ONESELF.”
That rule still lingers on the European continent. That’s why all countries there plus the British Australia and Canada have universal healthcare and greater environmental concern.
The USA has not been influenced by the REFORMATION, and it shows it in the absence of ‘social’ provisions and its lack of love for the earth, which are totally deficient by European – Reformational – standards.
Dr. Harold Bloom, in his classic THE AMERICAN RELIGION, categorically states that what is called religion in the USA has ceased to be Christian, and this is all too evident in the way the Christian Republican Party conducts itself during the TRUMP regime, both in the matter of Health Care and Climate Change.
YES, CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE DECIDING ISSUE TODAY.
The climate crisis is starting now. Mass migration, in part due to climate change, is already starting. Deaths by weather extremes are increasing as we watch them. The three hottest years on record are the three immediately behind us. We’re so close to +2 degrees Celsius warming already that we can almost taste it.
So what’s happening?
Simple. We have ceded control of climate policy to the greedy capitalists and crowd-pleasing politicians and spineless preachers, all who are marching to their final destination, unconcerned for leaving a depleted planet behind.
I believe that politics in the USA is dominated by Hal Lindsey’s THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH. There is a definite suicidal tendency in the USA, which is totally frightening.
REMEMBER EASTER ISLAND?
Jared Diamond in his book, appropriately called COLLAPSE has related several of such instances, of which the Easter Island is just one example.
The peoples settling the isolated Easter Island around 900 AD engineered their own collapse after several hundred years of expanding their population and quarrying gigantic stone statues (weighing up to 270 tons) which they then moved to the perimeter of the island. They deforested the island and the surrounding waters filled with silt, while at the same time vast energies were expended on rivalries over which clan could build the biggest stone head.
The first-recorded European contact with the island was on 5 April (Easter Sunday), 1722. Then Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited it for a week and estimated a population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.
When Captain Cook arrived at the island in 1774, he found a tiny population (down perhaps from a peak of 20,000) that he described as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” The civilization had collapsed in a cannibalistic endgame.
Now picture this happening to our SEVEN BILLION poor souls, rapidly doing an imitation of the EASTER ISLAND TRAGEDY.
Imagine some concerned villagers on Easter Island. They see people cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried. At some point, the number of worried people reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, “Sir, we have to stop cutting trees.”
The chief, who’s also CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.
Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?
There’s always a choice.
Do we depose the banks CEOs and the offending politicians and save the island, or fail to act while action is still possible? Or is it already too late in the game? Are we too drugged by our ‘carboholic’ lifestyle?
GNOSTICISM BACK IN STYLE.
GNOSTICISM is the dominating American religion. It separates nature from grace, the earth from the Creator. It preaches ‘HEAVEN’ and RAPTURE, both heralding a total disregard for the planet, again a typical American phenomenon.
The American “Christian” Right has fully endorsed Trump in his aims to call all environmental rules RUBBISH. For them this makes sense because they see the earth as evil and escape from it is seen as freedom. There is not a shred of Christianity left with the Republican Party, which now has a majority in Congress, in the Senate and in the White House, but is unable to rule.
AND NOW THE GENERALS CALL THE SHOTS.
Trump got elected by telling lies, half-truths and cover-ups, all manifestations of fatal weakness. When we can no longer tell the truth because the truth will bring the whole rotten, fragile status quo down in a heap of broken promises and lies, we’ve reached the perfection of dysfunction. When the truth cannot be told because it threatens the power structure of the status quo, that status quo is doomed.
Is America in decline?
A nation that has never been touched by the REFORMATION, that never really saw creation as a gift from God but always saw it as a source of exploitation; a nation that refuses to see human beings of all color and creed as equals, is a nation signing its own death warrant.
The USA is leading the world again: this time into chaos. It is too late to change course: the system has become ungovernable.
It is time to change course, individually and as families, “so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues, for her sins are piled up to heaven”, (Revelation 18: 4).
The Bible says that THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, John 8:32.
The TRUTH is that under the leadership of the USA this planet will self-destruct by human action and that Jesus, when he returns, will bring with him a perfectly cleaned planet where the saints will come marching in.
That’s why we now must train ourselves to live the kind of life that will be practiced in what the Scriptures call THE NEW CREATION, where pious people pursue perpetual permanency.