All Is Not Well: America “Completely Out of Control”

What could one possibly mean by saying one’s country is “out of control?”

An overwhelming majority of voters in the most competitive 2014 elections say it feels as if events in the United States are “out of control” and expressed mounting alarm about terrorism, anxiety about Ebola and harsh skepticism of both political parties only three weeks before the Nov. 4 midterms.

I don’t think we could arrive at the angst by trying to materially quantify the bleakness. Instead, we must breathe in, reflect, and feel our way through this one.

To many Americans, America is no longer a symbol of hope, pride, and community. It is has turned into a petty, administrative civic empire full of squabbling, backbiting militants and self-serving politicians. We are distrustful, envious, and in opposition to fellow countrymen like at no time in our county’s history.

The American Civil War must tip its cap to what is developing in America today. At least then the argument was clear. There was two opposing peoples who did what opposing peoples have always done: they went to war until the conflict ended.

Today diversity and special interests of every sort refracts America’s civic makeup like a house of mirrors in some backwater carnival. There are no opposing peoples. There is only opposition to everything.

We are no longer the land of the free or home of the brave. We are just competing blocs of ethnicities, beliefs, and ideologies. We are all men and women without a country.

This is the result of progressivism, which created and elected the ultra-individual above community and country. The same progressivism that gave us race politics, gender politics, and has engineered a destructive industrial grievance complex. The once homogenous country that existed before the 1960s has been replaced by a conglomerate admixture from every corner of the world.

Consequently, now there is no right or wrong, only the individual’s choice. No sanctity or moral behavior, only individual lifestyles. And certainly no true American culture or consciousness.

The individual owes nothing to his community or to the betterment of the moral character of his country. Instead, country and community must bend, if not break, for the individual.

Instinctual prejudices, the kind explained by Albert Einstein and Edmund Burke have been purged from public life. Politically correct universities and government public indoctrination are trying to undo in a generation, what has been instinctually known for centuries, as bigoted backward thoughts.

Einstein observed, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.”

Burke, much earlier, said the same, “Prejudice is of ready application in an emergency. It previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical and unresolved.”

So there you have it. Two of the greatest minds, one in philosophy, the other in science, would be unemployed, broke book salesmen in our new society.

Can you imagine the reaction of both men if they were instructed to refer to their students as purple penguins instead “boys” and “girls” so as not to offend any child in the classroom who identified himself as a girl? Would men as bright as they were even understand what "gender inclusiveness" meant?

The idea of “general prejudices” does not agree with today’s so-called public intellectuals’ idea of equality in everything. Every culture, religion, belief, behavior or prerogative is equal to the next, no matter what facts or common sense has to say about it.

Possibly, we’ve arrived at the angst and why so many Americans feel the country is out of control.