🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <628sn0$rjf@nnrp4.farm.idt.net> John Dyson,
jrdyson@pipeline.com writes:
>Which, sadly enough, is something our country no longer has.  Based on
>'history,' we're already on the downfall--massive pornography, people OVERLY
>concerned about what they think their own likes or rights should be, instead
>of what is good for the GROUP or the town, or the nation, very high divorce
>rate, acceptance of homosexuality in society,  declining military, seperated
>parents with no core, family infrastructure, society making up more and more
>holidays and people making excuses NOT to work.  It's already
>happening....if you read The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reicht, and the Rise
>and Fall of the Roman Empire, you will see this as a common theme.  The next
>book?  The Rise and Fall of the United States.

You're nuts.

In case you forgot, the Third Reich fell because of a clever bastard
named Hitler, who took democracy to its ultimate conclusion.  He
convinced the Great Majority of the Folk that it would really be nice if
they took all the homosexuals, Jews, and human rights advocates and put
them in labor camps (till they were worked to death).  Gee, it's amazing
how rich you can get when you agree on which people to kill for their
stuff.  And the same, of course, applied to foreign policy ... explaining
how they "fell".  Certainly, neither acceptance of homosexuality, nor
pornography (remember how Hitler dealt with "modern art", let alone
pornography!) nor a declining military, nor a lack of work ethic (you
should look up the "Workbook" system that Hitler set up to encourage
productivity!  Among his Aryans, yet!) had anything to do with Germany's
fall.  They were very, very virtuous in your terms, right up until the
end.

The Romans' fall is more debated - it took a long time! - but I'd argue
that the concentration of all power to an executive and the Praetorian
Guard (the Romans' equivalent of the NSA or SS...), followed by a series
of devastating civil wars between rival power blocs, had something to do
with it.  The good thing is that if your vision of America comes true,
the civil war will be fought with nuclear weapons, and will involve
almost no human suffering - a few days and it will all be over.  I agree
the U.S. is in danger of such a fall, but for this reason, not yours. 
Your perception that an even MORE powerful central government is
"necessary" for your "values" is part of the REASON why the U.S. is going
to fall.

If you want to PRESERVE society, then you'd better look to the values
people really have, and not those you'd like to impose on them.  We NEED
those rights, not "for our own sake" but for the sake of SOCIETY, to keep
it stable.  To put some limit on how much the whole world can be torn up
by people fighting each other for power.  If we assume we have the right
to free speech, the right to speak whatever language we wish, the right
to move freely, the right to associate with whom we wish, the right to
fair judgment by our peers, the right to have weapons, the right to
control our own lives in a hundred other ways I could list - then the
political battles will be limited in scope.  People won't be hostages to
the makeup of the next congress, they won't be sitting in prison or
avenging their relatives' deaths.  That is how you keep a society stable.
 Not with vague notions that someone else's activities are your
"downfall", and fascistic plans to bring them into the fight, with who
knows what conclusion.