America is Decaying from the Inside

voterThis is the year we either decide to continue down the same destructive path or veer right. I opt for veering. Big government did not just happen, it should not have happen, yet it did! What went wrong?

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” George Washington

Everyone senses that something is terribly wrong yet no one seems to know what to do about it. The economy is in a mess, both here and abroad, producing a sense of frustration and boding anxiety. The global markets are unstable and volatile. Central banks are pumping massive money transfusions into the system. The world is awash in oil and there are gluts in commodities like copper and nickel. Inflation is dangerously low. Some banks are even charging negative interest. Contrary to dire Malthusian predictions of the past, the world is drowning in its overproduction and abundance. Tens of trillions of dollars in government and consumer debt also weight it down.

This is a crisis that has not been seen before. Governments and economists have thrown every economic trick in the Keynesian book at the crisis in an attempt to jumpstart, kick-start or even taser-start the economy into prosperity. Many bankers are saying there simply are no more lifeboats to rescue this seven-year recovery that never seems to get any traction.

Yet the cause of our problems goes much deeper than the numbers on the bottom line. What we are seeing now, according to Chuck Colson, “is the full fruits of 30 years of relativism, the death of truth, in the academy in particular, and in public discourse, and the coarsening of public discourse, [the] coarsening of politics.” Everybody looks to the elections and thinks the elections will settle this problem or that problem. Yes, it is true that the people we put in office, the type of person that they are and what they believe, makes a difference but, elections can’t solve the problem we’ve got. Our problem is that our culture is decaying and has been for the last 30 or 40 years. We ourselves are broken, morally, politically and economically. So how do you fix the culture?

Culture is formed by the belief system of the people. If things are bad, don’t think it’s going to be solved by an election – it is going to be solved by us. When you have a healthy culture, you have healthy politics. So it comes right back to us. Look in the mirror. That’s where the problem is.

In other words, we have lost that vital link that served as the foundation for our Constitution. We severed ourselves from our Christian roots, the natural institutions of family and community and the common law tradition that normally and naturally serve to temper and limit government. It’s that simple. Our nation’s customs and values have changed and not in a good way. There is no longer a core, a canon of shared moral values that keeps things together.

We have become a nation of self-obsessed users looking for instant gratification. There is a prevailing lack of restraint that we mistake for freedom, a lack of restraint that leads to that very malaise that something is terribly wrong since there is no unity or direction.

In the face of this crisis, election rhetoric becomes empty and meaningless. How can candidates speak about helping families when they fail to address the fact that families are disintegrating from divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, promiscuity and neglect? How can they talk about stimulating growth in communities when there is little left to stimulate?

How can they end their speeches with the hope that God will bless American with prosperity when He is banished from the public square?

“When a democracy bases itself on moral relativism and when it considers every ethical principle or value to be negotiable … it is already, and in spite of its formal rules, on its way to totalitarianism. The might of right quickly becomes might makes right.” Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski

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