Maybe you believe that Hillary would have been in a richly deserved jail cell long ago were she not a protected Democrat. Maybe you believe the reason a dubious candidate like Donald Trump got legs is conservative voters are fed up with Republicans in Washington selling out to become part of that corrupt cesspool that ignores Constitutional limits on the federal government. Maybe you are an independent or Democrat with deep worries about the future of our country.
If so, I would agree with you and observe you are far more serious than the oblivious American public and trivia-focused news media, jointly trapped in their own orgy of liberal navel-gazing on marginal issues like gay marriage, transgender bathroom rules, global warming, or banning on-campus words called “micro-aggression” to protect college students from the collision with daily life.
Meanwhile these same well-intended people who believe government rules are the answer to life’s warts and wrinkles are perfectly willing to ignore a president stepping outside his Constitutional boundaries to ignore laws he doesn’t like, pulling the teeth from our military by cuts and making sensitivity the standard of measure, piling ever more duplication and overlap of costly federal social services and running a national debt that cannot be repaid up through the stratosphere.
Can our country recover from the damage? For reasons I’ll save for another column, I doubt we can even if we elect Superman as President.
But those are our immediate problems. If you are willing to think outside your comfort zone, let me suggest there is an even more lethal longer-term threat.
There is a storm of global human conflict brewing, and I wonder how many of you see it coming as I do. It is coming, I believe, because we have lost the intrinsic protection summed up in the simple word, “isolation.”
Human beings have been collecting into herds of various descriptions and killing each other with vigor for a million reasons since man first sharpened stone weapons around campfires. There are logical, understandable and also completely irrational reasons for civilizations to violently collide including language, culture, religious beliefs, territory, competition for resources and so on.
Many of us are old enough to remember when we were safely isolated from those who hate us by distance, oceans, geographic features like mountain ranges, even more fragile boundaries like borders. If radically conflicting civilizations have no contact, we can live in peace.
But the protection of that isolation is gone. Now every bunch that hates us is in our face. We are victims of the technological success we have achieved, mostly developed in America and shared with the world to make us extraordinarily connected worldwide.
Every group with a gripe, whether local or in the middle of nowhere, can find sympathetic activists by cell phone or the Internet and collaborate to inflict their grievance on the target of their choice, with confidence the effects of any extreme violence will be multiplied by a voraciously hungry media spreading their hideous story to fill too many 24/7 news channels.
As the disaffected organize, using newfound tools of computers and staying informed by our own media, they become smarter daily about the weak spots in America, and there are many. Our citizens are obliviously self-absorbed. Our elected leaders cannot see past their own constituency or the next news cycle affecting their own re-election.
Our borders are not enforced. Vigilance against illegal entry has been replaced by a softened cultural change and policies welcoming and protecting illegals with the cover word of “undocumented,” as if they deserve documents that have not yet arrived to legitimize their presence in our country. And of course the illegals, whether from Mexico or more remote countries who hate us, receive government services funded by the taxes we pay.
The “melting pot” of America has morphed into “multiculturalism” in which we are scolded by liberals to accept all cultures as equals, and our own government policies fail to encourage learning the English language or any form of assimilation.
Europe has all but capitulated due to the lack of assimilation of ungrateful immigrants hostile to their host country. While European leaders fiddle and do nothing to upset the sensitivity of an open welcome, pockets of hostile immigrants collect in selected areas where they resist the policing or oversight applied to the rest of the country, and with a birth rate of three times that of westerners, patiently await the day their votes will reach a majority. Will America go the same way?
It doesn’t help that we are so deeply politically divided in America that getting anything meaningful done is darn near impossible. We have many inherent weaknesses which I won’t list and thereby give the crazies any ideas, but they already know our escalating concentration of records, accounts and controls to electronic centers means constant exposure to hostile hackers working furiously to overcome security measures.
And it is only a matter of time before the crazies get nukes or biological weapons.
What can we do about it? Well, first we have to awaken the public and the news media to pull their head away from their own naval, and I seriously doubt that can be achieved.
If we were able to act together — which approaches the impossible — here are the minimal actions I see required from the unofficial realm of my armchair:
1. Secure our borders with lethal force, and enforce immigration laws.
2. Eliminate sanctuary cities by any means necessary.
3. Reinstate enforcement of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That means reverse the large pile of Congressional over-reach they accomplished by excuse of the Commerce Clause, and return to the limited government intended by the Constitution.
4. Pass a Constitutional amendment stating America was founded on and remains dedicated to Judeo-Christian principles, and we welcome other faiths so long as they do not step on our core values.
5. Pass a Constitutional amendment stating we welcome legal immigrants so long as they learn the English language, obey our laws, assimilate into our culture, and understand they are not eligible for welfare or other government largess until after five years as a citizen. Maybe 10.
6. Pass a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, so that Congress would have to allocate scarce resources and thereby forced to get rid of egregious duplication and overlap and excesses indulged at taxpayer expense by the corrupt practice of deficit spending.
7. Pass a Constitutional amendment to require Congressional term limits, and eliminate Congressional pensions.
8. Restore the power to the U.S. military by reinstating battle-hardened leaders purged by the Obama administration for their lack of political harmony, reinstating the combat-readiness priority and re-considering the required level of forces.
9. Be vigilant for enemies, foreign and domestic, and be ready and willing to defend America’s principles with quick and decisive action. At the risk of seeming radical, I would argue Obama was and remains a domestic enemy and should have been impeached, if only the Republicans had a bit of courage.
These steps would be a start toward self-defense in a world on the road to chaos.
A liberal attitude of open, loving welcome of all peoples to our country is a feel-good indulgence we cannot afford if our civilization is to survive. We must recognize there are strong and gathering forces bent on the destruction of Western civilization, and we must awaken from flower-children gullibility and decide whether we will help them eradicate us, our children and the West, or whether we have any guts left for a fight.
So far we are organized to lose.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is [email protected].]
